Cruiser Charisma

The dream of self-sufficiency and sustainability has become true. Everyone is now able to produce goods, to communicate with anyone without being charged or tracked and to fulfill their basic needs without forgoing modern conveniences.

Rendering of the Cruiser Charisma

Model of Cruiser Charisma as exhibited at RCA

Cruiser Charisma intertwines extrapolations about the latest (and upcoming) advances in technologies with a series of research trips that designer Jonas Loh made into intentional communities, groups of people who attempt to establish their own society on a micro-scale. He visited Earthaven which is ruled by community consensus and divided in small villages, went to see what remained of the ethics and ideals of The Farm and even made a trip to Berlin, Ohio, to get to know the Amish lifestyle built around religious beliefs and resistance to modernity.

Amish doll are faceless

Caravan at Earthaven Community

The project also professes faith into D.I.Y. and open source movement which could one day take technologies that are currently out of you and i -such as synthetic biology, genetic engineering, bio-printing and new form of production methods- out of the hands of venture capitalists and politicians and into everybody else's backyard.

The outcome of the project is utopian, yet credible: a caravan which will run on advanced biofuels, whose inhabitants will be able to produce all kinds of goods and organic materials thanks to a 3D printing production unit, eat synthetic protein rich meat that will be grown through a new generation of plants, recycle their poo to produce energy and experiment with new ways of community living.

Useful Synthetic Plant Garden & Production Facility

Conveyor belt, part of the production unit

Interestingly residents would communicate over long distance using the Earth-Moon-Earth, aka moon bounce, a radio communications technique developed after World War II. The system relies on the propagation of radio waves from an Earth-based transmitter directed via reflection from the surface of the Moon back to an Earth-based receiver. The residents of the caravan selected this form of long-distance communication because it is not yet privatized and because their personal data doesn't get tracked.

Rendering of the Cruiser Charisma

The project explores the possibility to reach a total state of self-sufficiency and with it a different social, political and economical system.

Amish One-Room School

Earthaven Community

All images courtesy of Jonas Loh.
Another project by Jonas Loh (together with Steffen Fielder): Known Unknowns.

Cruiser Charisma is a project developed at the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art in London.