Cupidastic
Can Microplastics hormone disruption be turned into future Love sparks?
2025, Royal College of Art
Since the dawn of humanity, the desire to predict the future has remained one of our most enduring aspirations. If the weather were always clear, there would be no need for forecasts. In the same way, the unpredictability of the future is not only a source of existential anxiety, but also the very condition that allows us to imagine a better one. As a design futurist, I sometimes choose to amplify the probability of positive projections, even within the bleakest of scenarios, persuading contemporaries to believe in a future that aligns with that possibility. Even if it is a probability so small that it may appear as an error to someone.
Microplastics, the replacement of human role by AI, declining birth rates have already settled into the status of Hyperobjects: vast, distributed phenomena that elude human comprehension or control. In this context, we may be the last generation with the responsibility to reimagine what it means to become better forerunners. In response, I propose Cupidastic. I conduct research into early signals of complex future problem framings—across environmental, social, and anthropological dimensions—and link seemingly isolated issues into a single predictive phenomenon.
Future scenario of [Cupidasitc], 2025
Cupidastic is a future system that transforms the invisible concentration of microplastics accumulated in the human body into the phenomenon of hormonal disruption—specifically visualizing the decline of love-signalling hormones such as Oxytocin.
Within this system, even if users are matched through AI algorithms designed to suggest ‘perfect partners’, they have to temporarily increase their Oxytocin levels to ignite the elusive love spark that resists quantification. In this process, users simultaneously place trust in the AI’s suggestion of the ideal match while also harbouring a deeply human and irrational desire to fall in love with someone toward whom they feel an uncontrollable pull.
To accommodate this duality, the system allows users to transmit Synthetic Thermographic Data - intimate signals that are perceptible only between mutually consenting individuals and difficult for AI to detect - thereby disrupting the algorithm’s optimized logic.
Ultimately, even in a future where human bodies fall into states of hormonal dysregulation due to microplastic saturation, and even if AI systems come to determine whom we love, this project proposes that as long as humans can remain unpredictable to one another, as long as they can still be variables, there exists a form of positive predictive error that embodies a final expression of humaneness which AI cannot replicate.
[Figure 1_AI generative image of the 'Reproduction Futurism in Microplastics Age']
01. Problem framing
This project investigates how synthetic environmental conditions, specifically the Reproduction Futurism from hormonal disruptions caused by MicroNanoPastics(MPs) are reshaping Human Reproduction, Humaneness, and Caring.
At its core, it asks ‘What does it mean to Future of Humaneness as Love and Care in a biologically altered, algorithmically regulated world?’
Microplastics are no longer external pollutants. Their infiltration into human tissues, endocrine systems, and reproductive organs points to a slow but systemic rewriting of biology itself. As these substances disrupt hormonal regulation (notably through BPA, phthalates, and dioxins), they generate new affective and thermal conditions in the body - invisible to AI-driven health monitoring systems. Reproductive futures are no longer shaped solely by genetic, cultural, or political factors, but by the plastic particulates that settle into organs, skin, and hormones. Bodies become porous, synthetic, and unpredictable. Reproduction is no longer a function; it becomes a speculative condition.
This project is structured across five interlinked conceptual stages:
1. Microplastic Futures: where the human body is rendered a synthetic filter and heat-absorbing organism
2. Reproduction Futurism: a speculative framework that explores how microplastic-induced hormonal disruption reconfigures human reproductive capacity and identity
3. Future Regulation(Biopolitics): where birth becomes a system-managed event, surveilled and scored
4. Future Love Tracking: where affect becomes data, and algorithmic intimacy displaces emotional unpredictability. And new rights must be imagined for those who remain unmeasured, unplanned, and systemically invisible.
[Figure 3_A diagram that translates the Research into a defined Problem Framing]
Systemically, this project examines entangled human-biological, environmental-material, and AI-governed layers. It deliberately moves between macro (state-level regulation and biopolitics), meso (welfare infrastructures, Reproduction clinic systems), and micro (thermal fluctuations and endocrine shifts in individuals) scales to reveal the often-overlooked intersections between ecological harm and affective experiences.
Temporally, it sits in the long to half-century-scale timeframe. Hormonal shifts caused by endocrine disruptors take generations to accumulate; likewise, shifts in reproductive policies and cultural ethics evolve slowly, through embodied change. The question this project poses is not simply how reproduction will evolve, but what kinds of reproductive non-events, unplanned births, and unreadable loves will persist outside algorithmic systems and how can we design for them?
[Figure 4_A diagram that visualizes the Problem Framing through Worldbuilding]
02. Methodology
This project is grounded in posthuman discursive design, speculative practice, and environmental biopolitics. The methodology aims to move beyond instrumentalist approaches common in conventional design thinking by embracing nonlinear processes, sensory experimentation, and emotional tension. It is organized around a four-stage framework developed specifically for this project: Sensing, Forecasting, Worldbuilding, and Materializing.
[Figure 5_A newly structured diagram of future methodologies, reinterpreted from those used in this project, Hanna Park (2025)]
The process began with a visual and annotated literature review using Padlet to explore interdisciplinary connections between microplastic toxicity, algorithmic surveillance, reproductive health, and posthuman theory. Theoretical foundations were drawn from the works of Donna Haraway, Johanna Schmeer, Corina Angheloiu, and Sophie Lewis. In parallel, speculative design and bio-art projects such as “Bioplastic Fantastics” and “Montgomery” future design diagram were analyzed to ground abstract theory in applied practice. Alongside this review, I developed and followed an original speculative methodology structured in four phases: Sensing, Forecasting, Worldbuilding, and Materializing. This framework emerged through my own iterative design process and functions as a speculative loop rather than a linear path.
In the Sensing phase, I conducted broad-based futures research using tools like STEEP, PESTLE, and Weak Signal analysis to capture the fragmented and emergent conditions influencing love, care, and reproduction. This phase sought out subtle biological and emotional signals, algorithmic patterns, and non-datafied phenomena, capturing the underlying uncertainties and cultural frictions that shape future imaginaries.
Based on these inputs, the second stage, Forecasting, applied speculative models like the Futures Cone and FutureScope to explore multiple temporal scenarios.These futures were not meant to predict outcomes, but rather to map emotional, ecological, and political stakes through possible, plausible, probable, and preferable lenses.
The third stage, Worldbuilding, translated forecasted futures into sensorial and narrative worlds. Drawing on techniques from design fiction and narrative prototyping, this phase introduced immersive story-worlds with spatial and temporal depth. Characters, such as AI-regulated lovers or post-biological caregivers, were developed to visualize affective contradictions within the reproductive systems of the future. This stage allowed participants to emotionally inhabit speculative conditions.
The final stage, Materializing, involved creating design artefacts that embody friction and failure rather than resolve problems. Artefacts included thermally reactive fabrics, sensory-blocking surfaces, and emotionally unreadable objects. These outputs were intended not as technological solutions but as critical tools for public dialogue, surfacing tensions between bodily ambiguity and algorithmic legibility.
This four-stage methodology was developed in response to the limitations of frameworks such as the Double Diamond or strictly user-centered design. These conventional approaches often struggle to engage with speculative uncertainty and the non-normative conditions that posthuman futures demand. Instead, this project’s methodology foregrounds the affective, symbolic, and material dimensions of care and reproduction under ecological and algorithmic disruption. Since the project does not involve human participants or biological data collection, formal ethics approval is not required. Nevertheless, due to the sensitive nature of themes like love, reproduction, and care, ethical reflection guided the project’s narrative tone, visual framing, and representational strategies. Emotional ambiguity and speculative discomfort were treated with respect and care.
In summary, this methodology connects theory and practice to explore how love and reproductive capacity might remain unreadable, unquantifiable, and ungovernable within future systems of control. Through tools of touch, heat, and emotional opacity, it asks how we might design for humanness in moments where systems inevitably fail to comprehend what care truly feels like.
03. Project Approach
This project adopts a hybrid design approach that draws from Posthuman design, Critical Speculative design, and multi-species thinking. Inspired by XenoFeminism and Post-Anthropocentric ethics, I reject the centrality of the normative, fertile, biologically optimized body. Instead, I work with the concept of Synthetic Embodiment, wherein MPs and hormonal misalignments are not anomalies, but foundational conditions. These bodies and future relationship demand infrastructures that support not their correction, but their recognition. Design, in this project, acts as both method and medium. Through speculative artefacts as the affective service flows and narrative spatial scenarios, I build a language for invisible reproductive states- those defined by hormonal noise, thermal unreadability, or social illegibility. I am not only focused on how love or fertility can be measured better, but also in how the impossibility of measurement can itself become a design concern.
This approach is inherently critical and speculative. Drawing from Dunne & Raby’s “Speculative Everything,” it uses fiction not as escapism, but as a provocation. From Colin Wright’s Love in the Time of AI, I adopt a Lacanian reading of posthuman desire: love is not algorithmically compatible, and it is structured by misrecognition, fragmentation, and excess. In a similar vein, Derrida’s deconstruction of binary structures helps me question the human/non-human, natural/artificial dualisms embedded in reproductive systems. Johanna Schmeer’s bio-artwork inspires how speculative materials (like synthetic hormones, engineered tissues, data-responsive surfaces) can be mobilized in embodied, intimate scales.
Importantly, the project engages with the thermal body as a site of resistance. The concept of heat becomes the project’s key speculative and design device. Heat is treated not as temperature, but as evidence, of desire, hormonal deviation, unstimulated emotion, or unacknowledged fertility. It is what remains when systems cannot feel. By rendering those signals-not as errors but as truths-the project reclaims embodied difference from within system failure. Design here is not a tool to fix reproduction, but to expand what reproduction could mean-as an affective right, a glitch in care systems, or a space for unregulated love. It is a politics of touch, heat, hormone, and the unknown form of future love. These speculative artefacts are not prototypes for implementation but would be tools for thinking ethically about the limits of sensing, simulation, and care. Ultimately, this project is anchored by an ethical provocation: In the future scenario I am designing, what human experiences remain unreachable by AI systems and how do we hold space for them?
04. Key research findings
[Figure 7_ Researches about the ‘Microplastic-Oxytocine’ and ‘Global future fertility’ Forecasting (Wang, L. et al. (2024) 'Exposure to polystyrene microplastics reduces sociality and brain oxytocin levels through the gut-brain axis in mice,' The Science of the Total Environment, 945, p. 174026.), (Global fertility in 204 countries and territories, 2021)]
First, emerging biological evidence ties micro-plastic exposure directly to oxytocin dys-regulation. By ‘Exposure to polystyrene microplastics reduces socilality and brain oxytocin levels-’(2024), Wang demonstrated that chronic administration of polystyrene microplastics in mice depresses brain oxytocin levels and reduces social-investigation behavior via the gut-brain axis. This study supplies an empirical cornerstone for the project’s speculative premise that an “Oxytocin Recession” could manifest in human populations by mid-century.
Second, Hume.AI workshop at Royal College of Art (05.06.2025) validated the measurability of momentary “love-spark” events in the present day, independent of future toxic burdens. 18 participants were assigned to random, friend, or partner dyads and completed a protocol of 30 s long range gaze, 30s close range gaze, and a 60s embrace while galvanic skin response (GSR sensor) and AI-based facial expression analytics were synchronously recorded. Variations in dyadic intimacy and hugging posture produced distinct affective signatures: self-reported arousal correlated positively with combined GSR facial “LOVE/JOY” tags (Pearson r = 0.62, p < 0.01). The experiment confirms that transient oxytocin-linked affect can be operationalized through multi-modal sensing, thereby justifying the device architecture proposed in this study.
Third, the same workshop revealed a pronounced appetite for affective-data sovereignty. 15 out of 18 participants agreed that emotional biometrics should be shielded from platforms and governments; and they also expressed willingness to integrate thermal “love spark” into daily life. These responses empirically ground the project’s ethical stance that emotional privacy is an emergent public concern rather than a speculative embellishment.
Collectively, these three insights reinforce the macro-drivers identified in the original project MPs toxicity, declining fertility, and algorithmic biopolitics, while introducing affective sovereignty as a new connective axis. Consequently, the design outcome shifts from a visualization of risk artefact to a love data encryption toolkit, positioning Cupidastic not merely as a warning but as an actionable intervention.
05. Scenario
[Figure 9_Future scenario sketch and Cupidastic system algorithm,2025]
By the late 2025 Microplastics are reclassified as endocrine-disrupting ambient pollutants, prompting the World Health Organization’s 2027 advisory on plastics-induced hormone drift. Throughout the “Ambient Plastics” phase (2030) newspapers begin printing daily polymer counts alongside pollen and UV indices. Between 2030 and 2035 the dating-app economy pivots from psychometric quizzes to bio-matching. Platforms mine wearable GSR and Oxytocin data to launch an “Oxytocin Index,” ranking prospective partners by fertility compatibility; love becomes a dashboard metric. The strategy backfires when epidemiologists link a sharp decline in successful pregnancies to BPA analogues.
In response, governments inaugurate the “Plastic-Driven Fertility Panic” (2035) citizens must present a Reproduction certificate certifying low tissue plastic load, effectively binding reproduction to chemical status.Against this backdrop hacktivist designers leak Cupidastic version 1(2040). Citizens will wear the vest-and-handle kit, and injecting synthetic heat noise into public sensors, rendering state love-rating AI blind. Legislators counter with the Algorithmic Romance Act (2045), making “Optimized Partner Recommendation” compulsory and penalizing non-compliant couples with tax surcharges. Public trust erodes further after a high-profile “Love-Compliance Audit” misclassifies siblings because of thermal artefacts.
By 2055 algorithmic pairings dominate, yet clusters of users deploy Cupidastic to inject positive prediction errors—moments of unquantifiable attraction that no model can price. A final vignette shows two state-matched strangers sharing a clandestine pink aura, logging only as a “Love Spark” while they choose an unauthorized future, proving that human unpredictability endures inside a plastic and data-saturated world.
06. Design outcome
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A. Recycled-leather Hug Vest: two shoulder units anchor the rope and align bodies for an optimal hug; no sensors are embedded in the garment itself.
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B. Alternative-Oxytocin(GSR) Handle Unit: each handle contains GSR and PPG sensors; a magnetic latch and retractable spool let users vary their physical distance from two metres to zero.
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C. Future Scenario Film (2min): 2 user (matched couple) in a ‘Cupidastic spot’ in public space using the system to verify their ‘Love spark’.
[Figure11_ Concept Photo of Cupidastic-design outcome-vest]
07. Reference List
Baylis, F. (2019). Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing. Harvard University Press.
Chen, J.Y. & Zhu, H. (2019). Artificial intelligence in healthcare: Past, present and future. Seminars in Cancer Biology.
Couldry, N. & Mejias, U.A. (2019). The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford University Press.
Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy.
Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.
Frontiers in Endocrinology. (2022). Microplastic exposure and endocrine disruption. Available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2022.1084236/full
Galloway, T.S. & Lewis, C.N. (2016). Marine microplastics spell big problems for future generations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(9), pp.2331–2333.
Haraway, D.J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Krell, D. & Smith, L. (2021). Algorithmic Intimacy and the New Politics of Reproduction.
Lewis, S. (2019). Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. Verso Books.
Liang, A. (2025). Artificial Intelligence Clones. [Forthcoming].
Lupton, D. (2016). The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Polity Press.
Malicse, A. (2025). The Future of Human Reproduction and Family Structure. [Forthcoming].
National Library of Medicine. (2023). Effects of Microplastics on Human Fertility. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9885170/ (Accessed: 5 May 2025).
Preciado, P.B. (2013). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the
Pharmacopornographic Era. The Feminist Press.
Schmeer, J. (2014). Bioplastic Fantastic: Between Products and Organisms.
Sharon, T. (2018). When digital health meets digital capitalism: Reinventing care in the algorithmic age. Big Data & Society.
Strathern, M. (1992). Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies. Routledge.
World Health Organization. (2019). Microplastics in Drinking Water.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.
Gila Stopler, “Biopolitics and Reproductive Justice: Fertility Policies between Women's Rights and State and Community Interests” (2015)
Timothy Morton (2013), Hyper Object
Barbara E. Gibson(2020), The micro-politics of caring: tinkering with person-centered rehabilitation, Taylor&Francis group
08. Credit
Scenario Video
Director
Jin Roh
Designer/Scenario
Hanna Park
Starring
Bettina Man
George Rybi
Creative Technologist
Chanwoo Lee
Assist
Jajun Lee
Concept Photo
Photographer
Sohee Goo
Model
Vishal Mehta
Hanna Park
Copyright 2025 Hanna Park