Deep Dive (Bodies & Identity)
Tiffany Shen, Brandon Tay, Miles Montgomery
August 6th, 2026
Group 7 Deep Dive Documentation
Our Deep Dive workshop took place during our Bodies and Identity-themed week. We focused on posthumanism, body and technology enhancement, and technology’s interaction with human senses. We asked our participants to consider their feelings and boundaries regarding the integration of technology into their everyday lives.
We started with a simple screen time check; Tiffany asked our peers to write down what they believe their average daily screen time to be, and then asked them to check their actual average screen time and compare the results. Following the screen time check, Brandon led an activity called IS THIS A FACE, in which he showed numerous photos of faces and face-like (pareidolic) objects, and asked the class for their consensus on whether or not certain things could be considered objects. Following the slideshow, Brandon demonstrated a simple computer program that he wrote using OpenCV’s facial recognition API to detect “faces” in various images, with the class uploading photos to run through the face detection API.
After the facial recognition demonstration, Miles led an activity where our peers were paired up and asked to write forms of technology that they felt interacted with specific human senses. The senses were: physical senses, sense of self, sense of belonging, sense of time, sense of safety, and sense of reason. After making rounds for each sense, the groups split up and were asked to write feelings that they associated with specific types of technology and draw connections between those feelings and technologies.
The final activity was led by Tiffany, in which she had our peers write a “letter to your future self,” where everyone individually journaled on a paper with categories titled “WHAT I’M DOING NOW,” “WHAT I’M SCARED FOR,” and “WHAT I’M EXCITED FOR.” These categories were intentionally left vague to inspire participants to journal about whatever came to mind, though we suggested that they write a bit about their feelings regarding technology specifically. Following this activity, Brandon presented a video edit to the song “BIPP” by SOPHIE, portraying concepts and visual material from our workshop in a humorous and ironic way.
Overall, the workshop was designed to get our classmates to first consider their relationship with personal devices, then consider how technology perceives them, and finally consider how they perceive technology, especially in its rapidly growing and changing state. By writing their feelings about their futures with technology, we hoped that participants would gain a better understanding of where their personal boundaries sit.
As a group, we planned the outline of our workshop in one long 5-hour session with Chrissy mentoring us. We found that many of our prior ideas would not actually achieve our goals in practice, so we had to reconstruct a couple sections in that one session. The workshop ended up going quite smoothly, and it seemed like our participants all had a good understanding of our goals and methodology. Much of what we learned about presenting came directly from Chrissy the night prior; she gave us lots of good advice about our structure and what works the best for hands-on workshops like Deep Dives.
Slides: Deep Dive Slides G7
Real-Time Object Tracking on FPV UAV Drone | DIY AI Target Lock System Test
dist (Brandon’s OpenCV facial recognition app)
I CAN MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER.mp4 (Brandon’s video edit)
(Personal reflection)
My contributions to our Deep Dive activity were the pre-work and the “merry-go-round” activity (title credit to Tiffany). In that activity, we asked our peers to name technologies that affect different human senses. We grouped the five physical senses into one category, since most wearable technology interacts with multiple physical senses. The other senses were reason, safety, self, time, and belonging. We yielded very diverse results under each category, as can be seen in the photo album linked above.
The merry-go-round activity was heavily inspired by the “curiosity syllabus” activity that we did in Exploratory Making. We wanted to capture a flow of ideas shared by everyone in our class to then examine how ideas might contradict or complement each other, and how some people might notice similarities between certain ideas that others may miss. It feels very satisfying to see the images of the boards containing so much rich knowledge and shared experiences.
