Faith Condition is the graduation project in Industrial Design by Lukas Franciszkiewicz, a designer who has focused his creative practice on some important questions concerning our media society. In particular Franciszkiewicz focused his research on the inability of traditional religions to fully understand the notion of altered sensory perception. The work Faith Condition questions a trend seen in many contemporary technologies: they transmit security and trust rather than transparency – a mechanism that is at the core of every religion. From this concept, Franciszkiewicz has made a number of ‘objects for the conditioning of faith’ that are able to recreate the atmosphere, perceptions and actions that we usually associate with religious practices. These objects are very much appreciated for their great attention to detail; their surfaces evoke the Apple design or the minimal aesthetic of the Nintendo Wii. Two among them strike the imagination most effectively: the first is an object that induces reflections on technology addiction; a camera mounted on a sort of pedestal with wheels and a rope that you can carry around like a futuristic pet. It seems to suggest that, in a world with increasing numbers of different points of view, it is possible to bring along a kind of totem which can satisfy the human need for an objective view. The other object is more difficult to define: it is a sort of kneeler. Inviting genuflection as a typical religious behaviour, it ritually mixes a routine associated with a generic technology and the symbolic gestures that we associate with faith. The question raised by Franciszkiewicz’s prototypes is: how much is the faith we place in our everyday technological objects changing our behavior and moral attitudes?
Vito Campanelli