‘Skinsucka’ is a design provocation which explores and questions our attitudes to consumerism, robotics and biotechnology in a timeframe of 10 to 20 years from now. The Skinsucka movie draws attention to the hyper-consumerism that blinds us to the exploitative forces that make it possible to produce a garment in Asia and ship it half way around the world to a high street in Europe, for less than the cost of junk food. Skinsucka reveals a scenario where microbially powered autonomous micro-devices share our living spaces and eat household dirt. As slaves and servants have done for millennia before them, these microbots, powered by bacterial energy, perform tasks we deem mundane, repetitive or dangerous.

Skinsucka reveals a scenario where microbially powered autonomous micro-devices share our living spaces and eat household dirt.

‘Skinsuckas’ clean the skin as well as the home, removing the vestiges of make up and providing the remedies to combat the excesses of the night before. They swarm over the body, extruding threads of metabolised household dirt that they weave into clothing, in a daily ritual of real-time, customised manufacture and constant recycling. This design provocation suggests that robots will continue to perform the servile, worker roles that have previously been carried out in sweatshops, in an ever-increasing intimacy between humans and machines, as our technology evolves from electro-mechanical artifact to biological, living appliance. It challenges us to consider the ethical issues of where we source the products we consume, the processes that have been employed to produce them and the social and environmental impact of our consumption.