“I’ve been investigating complex science for two decades. We can’t un-invent technology, and it all lands on the body,” Lucy McRae told designboom this week. “The body has been my canvas, tool, and medium.”
The British-born Australian artist works across sculpture, film, conceptual fashion and experimental design, and the body is both her starting point and her test rig. She leads Future Sensitive, which she describes as a worldbuilding research institute at the frontier of body futurism and post-nature — a network of scientists, artists and designers working the same questions from different directions.
The Philips decade
McRae studied interior design at RMIT, then led a far-future design research lab at Philips from 2006 to 2010. The work there was wearable technology in its genuinely speculative phase: emotional-sensing dresses, electronic tattoos.
It left her with the question that has organised everything since — what happens when technology becomes inseparable from the body? Her answer has been to keep making the technology concrete enough that people can have an opinion about it.
Swallowable Parfum, and fiction as a market signal
The clearest case is Swallowable Parfum, developed with synthetic biologist Sharef Mansy: a cosmetic pill that would make the body produce its own fragrance from the inside.
“After leaving Philips I kept looking at technology through an art and worldbuilding lens,” she says. “What happens when technology becomes the size of a blood cell, and we can eat it? I was also exploring pheromone excretion, and how the smell of our immune system is body odor. With Sharef Mansy, a synthetic biologist, we created Swallowable Parfum, a cosmetic pill that makes the body produce its own fragrance from the inside. We made it as a fictional beauty commercial, and it drew real responses from pharmaceutical brands. The fiction became a market signal.”
That last sentence is the whole method. The piece was presented as an advert — the most legible format in the beauty industry — and the industry replied as though to a product. Speculative design frequently struggles to escape the gallery; this one found its audience by borrowing their grammar.
“So does the body become tech when we eat it?” she asks. “Maybe the better question is what far greater things could exist if technology is swallowable.”
From the Triennale to Blade Runner
Compression Cradle was shown at the 2019 Milan Triennale exhibition Broken Nature, curated by Paola Antonelli. The work later informed a visual reference in Blade Runner 2099, for which McRae designed a crèche and birth bags for replicants.
It is a useful illustration of how speculative art actually travels: not as a prediction that comes true, but as a vocabulary that a production designer reaches for when they need to show a thing that does not exist.
Clothing as invisible architecture
Her interior design training shows in how she treats garments — not as objects worn on a body but as the smallest room a person occupies. The relationships she is interested in are between things: a room and a body, a machine and a building, a person and the space immediately around them. Clothing, understood that way, is architecture at the closest possible scale.
She has recently completed a clothing collection for Future Sensitive, drawing on costumes from films and artworks but intended for everyday wear, due to launch in Los Angeles in 2027. The stated interest is in how clothing can carry ideas about the future and change how the wearer feels in the present.
For a practice that has spent twenty years arguing that technology lands on the body, a wearable collection is a reasonable place to arrive.