Body-Safe Apocalypse : Sexual Materiality and Frameworks for Design During and Beyond Collapse

Abstract: Following the Covid-19 pandemic, a relatively mild global disruption, our global society experienced large-scale shortages of high-tech materials, the increasing cost or absence of many commodities usually taken for granted, and the floundering of industries that facilitate our global industrial civilisation such as shipping and aviation. By comparison, catastrophic climate change stands to be far more devastating.  Body-Safe Apocalypse is an attempt to encourage a shift in thinking and practice away from the presumed possibility of eternal “sustainable” growth within a digital, high-tech global context and towards a practical, grounded framework of understanding, preparing for, and working beyond the collapse of global, high-tech, industrial civilisation. The method of exploration is through an analysis of sexual materiality, the contextualisation of sexual and broader materiality within a failing industrial civilisation, and the creation of a sex toy using materials and processes accessible in a collapsing/collapsed global civilisation.  As well as focusing on the craft and materiality of sexual practices in a collapse context, Body-Safe Apocalypse provides theoretical framework on collapse meant to address a current gap in design literature, critique on the current Western/anglo design paradigm that is yet to consider the catastrophic as non-speculative, and encouragement to designers to look into- and then beyond- the upheavals and endings of the systems most of us have built our lives/careers around and upon.