Ghost Signals: 
Designing Synthetic Love Ignition in Microplasticene



Future Love Tracking
In the Age of Post Human Reproduction And Microplastics
2025



 
[Figure 1_AI generative image of the 'Reproduction Futurism in MPs Age']


This project interrogates the future legibility of human attachment when Microplastic(MPs) induced endocrine disruption converges with emotion sensing dating platforms in the mid twenty first century. Empirical studies linking MPs to reduced oxytocin suggest that felt attraction will become increasingly uncertain and thus subject to biopolitical(birth rate) regulation. The project proposes the 'Intimacy Sentinel', a product scale thermal interface that records biothermal bonding during a guided embrace and immediately reveals the discrepancy between embodied warmth and algorithmic affect labels. By situating this artefact within a speculative yet data grounded scenario of future dating and attachment scoring, the research demonstrates that relational care retains dimensions that remain resistant to quantification. Methodologically it combines sensing, futures forecasting, narrative world building, and material prototyping, offering both design guidance for industry and evidence for policymakers while inviting public audiences to encounter intimacy that eludes computational classification.






In the age of Reproduction Futurism shaped by microplastics and predictive regulation, love is no longer a matter of chance, but also it becomes an optimized investment. This project explores how hormonal disruption, synthetic embodiment, and thermal unreadability transform intimacy from the system level to the microlevel of interface and sensor. It speculates on where humaneness might persist outside systems, beyond what AI can sense or simulate, within the irreducible messiness of care.

This project begins from the premise that we are already inhabiting a postnatural4 condition. MPs, once distant and oceanic, are now intra-corporeal and they circulate through our bloodstreams, interfere with endocrine systems, and settle within reproductive tissues. Scientific research confirms that ingestion of micro- and MPs through food, water, and even air has become a normative, unavoidable part of human life. Their biological consequences are only partially understood, yet early data suggests they are fundamentally reshaping fertility, hormonal balance, and the shape of love. All of which influence how we experience intimacy, desire, and connection.

But this is not merely a biological crisis. It is also a crisis of legibility: of how our bodies and emotions are interpreted and regulated. In a world increasingly governed by algorithmic systems that claim to understand, predict, and optimize human behavior which including our romantic and reproductive choices, the threshold of what counts as “normal,” “healthy,” or “desirable” is being encoded into predictive logics. Within this speculative frame, the project posits a scenario where individuals no longer have the right to choose whom they love. Instead, AI-assisted reproductive systems recommend compatible partners based on biometric fertility alignment, genetic viability, and system stability. Love becomes not an expression of human agency, but a rationalized decision -a biometric match.

In such a world, what becomes of the human? Drawing from the conceptual metaphor of Ghost and Shell, this project considers the human as composed of two interdependent layers: the body (shell), and the spirit, emotion, or irreducible interiority (ghost). If microplastics corrupt the shell-the reproductive capacity and embodied agency of the posthuman body- and if AI regulation suppresses the ghost - the ability to love unpredictably, care irrationally, or desire outside of systemic norms- then the very condition of “being human” is destabilized. As Descartes6 asserted, “It is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it,” suggesting that the human essence lies in its thinking, feeling interiority. 
This project thus asks: What does the future of love and care look like in a biologically altered, algorithmically regulated world? To interrogate this question, the project develops a speculative framework called Reproduction Futurism. This framework moves reproduction beyond the realm of biology, and repositions it as a designed, political, and speculative construct. Rather than focusing solely on fertility or parenthood, Reproduction Futurism encompasses all the infrastructural, emotional, and technological systems that govern how intimacy is formed, expressed, and regulated in synthetic futures.

Also it unfold across multiple system scales:
  • Macro: state-level biopolitical governance, policy, and surveillance systems
  • Meso: healthcare institutions, reproductive clinics, and algorithmic matchmaking interfaces
  • Micro: shifts in hormonal response, skin temperature, emotional noise, and the irreducibility of felt experience
  1. [Figure 2_Micro to Macro Level Time Scale]




Temporally, the project operates on a long-term to half-century scale. Endocrine disruptions do not manifest instantly; they build cumulatively, with generational impacts. Cultural, ethical, and technological shifts in how we regulate reproduction and desire also unfold gradually, yet with accelerating pressure from ecological degradation and digital control. 

What once seemed like distant futures are now emerging rapidly. As such, the project engages a near- future speculative mode which close enough to feel plausible, distant enough to provoke. The project addresses urgent and overlapping environmental and social challenges. Environmentally, it brings critical attention to the invisible toxicity of microplastics, not merely as pollutants, but as agents of biological and affective reprogramming. Socially, it explores how algorithmic systems are increasingly mediating intimacy, enforcing new forms of affective normativity, and reducing love to a function of data.

This work exists within the broader frame of biopolitics, which interrogates how life itself is governed from birth to desire (birthrate in governance level). Within contemporary society, reproductive capacity is not only a personal or medical concern, but a site of geopolitical anxiety. Falling birth rates, demographic crises, and rising surveillance are converging into new forms of reproductive governance. In this context, love becomes a battleground — a final space of human agency under threat.

A Design Futures approach is essential because it enables the formulation of scenarios that defy current logics, rather than reinforcing them. Unlike problem-solving or human- centred design, speculative and posthuman design create space to reflect on systems, structures, and affects that are emergent, unreadable, or not-yet-recognized.

This project draws inspiration from Johanna Schmeer’s critique of anthropocentric design. Her framework for Xenodesign7 proposes new transversal modes of engagement that cut across binaries of nature/culture, fiction/reality, and human/non-human. Adapting her methodological ethos, this project seeks not to “fix” reproduction or love, but to render their boundaries unstable to create conditions where new imaginaries of intimacy and care might emerge.

Here, design becomes not a tool for optimization, but for interruption. It is a method for provoking reflection, visualizing resistance, and holding space for the unknowable. Through speculative artefacts, narrative scenarios, and thermally responsive materials, this project constructs a world where reconfigured intimacy might still be possible where care persists in the face of system failure, and where the ghost continues to move even when the shell is compromised.


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 Humaneness11 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 accumulate12; 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?


As a Design Futurist, my role in this project is not only to solve problems, but to critically render visible the absences, glitches, and ethical failures of reproductive systems in synthetic and algorithmic futures. I design not for optimization, but for exception for what escapes simulation, datafication, or institutional approval. I imagine speculative infrastructures for lives that remain systemically unmeasurable.

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.







[Figure 4_A diagram that visualizes the Problem Framing through Worldbuilding]




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—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?


The project could inform policy debates on endocrine-disrupting substances and algorithmic ethics, encourage new industry standards around intimate technology, inspire further interdisciplinary academic research, and stimulate public dialogue on the future implications of invisible environmental toxicity and algorithmic intimacy governance.

I plan to produce a series of Futurism Artefacts including a tangible MPs Free Zone pavilion, interactive thermal reactive interfaces, narrative visualizations, and an accompanying research publication. These outcomes will explore how love and intimacy might be materially and emotionally reshaped by hormonal disruption and algorithmic governance.

At the core of my design approach lies a central question: how can I sensorially communicate the futures I imagine to a wider audience in a critical yet accessible manner. Within this context, bodily heat becomes a crucial and paradoxical sensory vector. When MPs interfere with endocrine function, the Posthuman body loses its capacity to regulate internal temperature. Likewise, when a person falls in love, oxytocin and related hormonal activity trigger warmth that cannot be consciously controlled. While humans may possess the embodied awareness to intuit whether such heat stems from chemical toxicity or emotional experience, AI systems that observe us visually cannot make such distinctions. It is precisely in this gap between measurable data and lived sensation that human complexity becomes most visible. By designing a space that intentionally distorts the readability of thermal signals, the project aims to paradoxically reclaim the legibility of human emotion. To interrogate this hypothesis, I will prototype an experiential system within a speculative near-future scenario. The MPs Free Zone pavilion will serve as an affective architecture for testing intimate interaction, focusing particularly on the embodied gesture of hugging. Thermal cameras and semi opaque visual interfaces will be integrated to monitor, interrupt, and transform the thermal data produced during this act of shared bodily proximity. In parallel, I will conduct research into geographical regions identified as having extreme levels of MPs pollution and corresponding reproductive health anomalies. This research will support a robust worldbuilding process that is rooted in environmental realities while extending into speculative futures.

The project’s significance lies in its provocation: it questions the ethics of algorithmic intimacy, synthetic embodiment, and the reduction of emotion to quantifiable metrics. For the identified stakeholders, it offers both a speculative critique and design insights into emergent issues in consent, affective legibility, and biothermal feedback. For the public, it visualizes unseen forces that shape future love(romantic intimacy), making intangible systems emotionally and politically visible.