About
This is the website for The Needs Machine, a collaborative project between an artist, a researcher in psychology, and a philosopher, interested in exploring the complexities of human need.
In order to get to grips with the tricky topic of human need, the team behind The Needs Machine decided to explore the problems faced by Maslow's Hierarchy of Need, one of the most common psychological theories that aims to schematise the different kinds of need. Our aim was to explode this model, to look at it askance, and to devise a series of public experiments that could help us approach the topic of need in a new and imaginative way.
There will be five experiments, or 'actions', in total. The process will be iterative and we will use the information gathered in each action to help us design the next. You can click on the links above this post to look at the actions we have carried out so far, or to look at the actions we have planned for the future.
The project is supported by the King's College London's Collaborative Scheme for Early Career Researchers.
The three machine operators are:
Laura Palmer
Tim Shaw
Ed Thornton
You can contact The Needs Machine by emailing theneedsmachine[at]hotmail.com or by following us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheNeedsMachine
In order to get to grips with the tricky topic of human need, the team behind The Needs Machine decided to explore the problems faced by Maslow's Hierarchy of Need, one of the most common psychological theories that aims to schematise the different kinds of need. Our aim was to explode this model, to look at it askance, and to devise a series of public experiments that could help us approach the topic of need in a new and imaginative way.
There will be five experiments, or 'actions', in total. The process will be iterative and we will use the information gathered in each action to help us design the next. You can click on the links above this post to look at the actions we have carried out so far, or to look at the actions we have planned for the future.
The project is supported by the King's College London's Collaborative Scheme for Early Career Researchers.
The three machine operators are:
Laura Palmer
Tim Shaw
Ed Thornton
You can contact The Needs Machine by emailing theneedsmachine[at]hotmail.com or by following us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheNeedsMachine