Bianca Carague is a Netherlands-based Filipino artist, social designer and builder of digital spaces for social impact. With a Master's degree in Social Design from the Design Academy Eindhoven (2020), she combines design, research and worldbuilding to tell stories about new possibilities for the future. Next to her projects and exhibitions, she leads workshops in Europe to engage young people in Futures Literacy through art. Through the combination of her work on Futures Literacy, Worldbuilding and Storytelling, Bianca is emboldening people to reflect on society and express themselves both on and offline.
Gen C: Children of 2050
Gen C: Children of 2050 was an interactive growing exhibition about the future of childhood. In this exhibition, artist Bianca Carague imagined four different types of children that could exist in the year 2050 and takes visitors through their bedrooms. These future scenarios were based on climate change. Over the course of two months, Bianca Carague conducted interactive workshops which engaged the public in both critical and creative thinking about the future.
Mind Tower
Mind Tower is a mental health-themed virtual escape room game where players solve puzzles while building self-compassion and empathy. The goal is to escape not the tower but the confines of one's mind. This project was developed with support from The Sandbox.
Fiction And Reality
Fiction and Reality was an intensive 7-day workshop on worldbuilding designed and taught in collaboration with Matilde Patuelli. Students were given tools for creating fictional scenarios based on social issues as well as ways of creating digital/physical prototypes to immersively communicate their ideas.
Somnium Treehouses
Somnium Treehouses explored the possibilities for more intimacy between players and gamem world therapy in the virtual social platform Somnium Space. This was done by building an environment focused on intimate conversations and relationship counseling, where visitors of the platform could have meaningful encounters with strangers and interact with their therapist in a gaming environment. The serene environment provided drastic contrast to the harsh spaces which are more common to the platform.
Pro-Truth Society // Post-Truth Paradise
Pro-Truth Society // Post-Truth Paradise was a video game and virtual escape room game that took place in an underground panopticon. Players solved puzzles and completed quests to uncover the truth which would lead them to escape the panopticon building. This work was developed for Tetem and exhibited during the GOGBOT Festival 2021. The theme this year was post-truth, mis/disinformation and fake news.
Bump Galaxy
Bump Galaxy is a virtual world for mental health built in Minecraft. It took a bottom-up approach in dealing with mental health during the pandemic, such that it used a gaming environment to provide new physiological experiences of safety and social support through play. The project has been presented in Dutch Design Week 2020 and London Design Biennale.
You Will Not Be
Taking the directives of the digital economy to its most extreme, students from DAE mapped onto our bodies its repetitive commands, gestures, and anxieties, desperately trying to achieve the promises of happiness and self-fulfillment locked within. This performative research reflects not only how narratives of self-optimization and hyper-productivity shape design practice today, but also how these are in fact turning our day-to-day activities into nothing short of a performance.