Yet today, we increasingly incorporate new technology into just about every aspect of our daily lives, including the messy, all-too-human parts. From flirtations to breakups (and everything in between), the technology of today is part and partial to our emotional experiences. And, as any nostalgic clickbait article will tell you, technology also frames and colors our memories. For the Brazilian designer Guto Requena, technology shouldn’t be opposed to feelings. In fact, it actually opens up whole new ways to express our humanity.

Trained as an architect, Requena opened his São Paulo-based studio in 2008. Rather than specializing in just one aspect of design, Estudio Guto Requena dabbles in just about all of them, with a particular focus on emerging technologies and their affective capacity. Their Estudio Guto Requena reflects on memory, digital culture and poetic narratives across all design scales.work involves narratives and personal memories alongside cutting edge design and fabrication processes.

For example, Requena's "Love" project involved asking individuals to recount personal love stories. Sensors recorded minute physiognomic changes and relayed the information to specially designed software. Then, using Grasshopper, these "love stories" were modeled and turned into 3D-printed sculptural objects.

I got in touch with Requena to find out more about projects like this as well as his design motivations in general. 

What's your background? Where are you from and where did you train as a designer?

I am 36 years old and I was born in Sorocaba (in the countryside of the São Paulo State). I graduated in 2003 from the University of São Paulo, where I studied architecture and urban planning. For nine years I worked as a researcher at NOMADS.USP - Center for Interactive Living Studies of the University of São Paulo. In 2007, I got my Master’s degree at the same university with a dissertation [titled] Hybrid Habitation: Interactivity and Experience in the Cyberculture Era. 

How would you describe the design ethos of Estudio Guto Requena?

Estudio Guto Requena reflects on memory, digital culture and poetic narratives across all design scales. We like to say that we shape memories through the experimental use of digital technologies. Good design should tell a good story and our final aesthetic results from the process. We love hybrids, interactivity, overlaying analogic with numeric, parametric design and digital fabrication.

How large is your studio? Where in São Paulo is it? And what's the work environment like?

The size of our team varies according to project demand as our work method is based on collaboration with architects and designers from all over the world. We are currently located at Rua Oscar Freire, 1996, Pinheiros, São Paulo/SP. It’s a very nice and comfortable house [where] we co-work with five other offices here. It's a very cozy house – greenery, dogs and bikes are all very welcome.

What inspires your work? Are there other designers, artists, or architects – historical or contemporary – that most influence your practice?

As much as I get inspiration from architecture and design itself, I think it’s important to observe the discussion and retaking of the city, public space, urban mobility, the warmth of the streets – and make [a design] into a reflection about the way we live our contemporary life. Our recent project “I Am” expresses a lot of this idea by compiling emotions from volunteers on streets and displaying them on a big LED building façade on Paulista Avenue.I want to make tangible the intangible

But back to architecture, I’m influenced by experimental architects and designers like Lars Spuybroek, Kas Oosterhuis, Greg Lynn, and Lina Bo Bardi. I love emerging concepts from cyberculture and hybridism but definitely my biggest inspiration is the city, streets, pedestrians, people.

Your work involves some interesting conceptual strategies. For example, with your “Nóize” chair, audio files were used to corrupt a digital model of a Giraffe chair [by Lina Bo Bardi], in turn used to produce a new design. Can you describe the relationship between conceptual and formal strategies in your work?

I want to make tangible the intangible. For me a good design should tell a great story. It's not about drawing beautiful shapes, it’s more about growing it with the use of more abstract and sensitive inputs like music, emotions, movements, etc. I’m very interested in how we can use digital interactive technologies to shape objects, spaces and cities.

How do you first begin a new project?

Beginning a design project is a very intuitive, brainstorming situation as many ideas come up. But I like to keep focused on our concept and how can we apply some of our experiments (use of sensors, parametric shapes, collecting soundscapes like a heart beat, for example) to shape the object/space. 

With what materials do you prefer to work?

Working with a specific material depends on the demand of the design project. On a recent project, we created a vase collection in which one of the main initial concepts was the glass and its fabrication techniques. Studying the material and observing the extents we could take from it, its characteristics were embedded in the design process to create a collection from variations of these aspects. Of course the more sustainable the better and this is one of the starting points nowadays at the studio. 

How important are digital technologies and emerging fabrication techniques for your work?

Digital technologies and new fabrication processes take a fundamental place in the whole process of our work. I think we may say they un-constrain some creative limits on form-finding and data processing. Of course without these emerging techniques we are very capable of creating many interesting things, but they open a door for other options for design and architecture. Our “Love” project, for example, came from a particular interest in opening and democratizing more those design processes, allowing anyone to be part of it in a more collaborative process (as the “Once Upon a Time” collection is a very particular memory of my own childhood and “Nóize” is a collective memory of Sao Paulo and Brazilian culture). Somehow it is also about experimenting with those new numeric technologies in a more organic, cozier and humanistic way. In this project we are talking about the most basic human sentiment: LOVE. I truly believe that the digital era that we are just starting to participate in is our final chance to make us closer, helping us to be a better society. The future is definitely not so minimalistic and aseptic as we once imagined, it is indeed more humanist then ever and digital technologies are there especially to make it happen.

The future is definitely not so minimalistic and aseptic as we once imaginedThe “Love” project brings up the concept of “affective sustainability” which somehow all of my projects try to talk about. My idea is that if you build products with very personal histories and memory, those objects will have a longer life cycle, once they are not created to be “fashionable” or “fancy”. Also 3D printing breaks old rules of design economy, [such] as selling, distribution, production, and so on, which can also bring a more sustainable process. It’s happening to design the same that happened before with the music industry and this is amazing.

How beautiful is the idea of not creating products anymore but instead, processes, interfaces, etc., allowing the final clients to be part of the creative process as well, building and customizing their own realities, their own world, their own design. The next step of the “Love” project (under development at this very moment) is to create an app for mobile phones that allows anyone to narrate their personal love stories and through voice emotional analyses and heartbeat they will shape their own pieces. The final file will be copyleft and anyone will print it wherever they want.

Are there any future projects you could tell us about?

We are working on two exciting interactive projects for the Olympics, to be held in Rio de Janeiro in August. But it is still top secret ;-)

Interested in other adventures at the cutting edge of technology and design? Find more boundary-blurring pieces here, part of Archinect's special February theme, Furniture.