Environment Transformer was an essential component of the Gelbes Hertz experiment. Visitors to the pulsating yellow microenvironment wore it as a prop for maximum enhancement of their sensorial individual experience inside the pod. In a hypothetical taxonomy of objects, the Environment Transformer would be closer to the 3D paper glasses than to the helmet in that it was not about protecting the brain, but about expanding it: an artificial spherical transparent layer designed to enhance visual and acoustic sensory input, whatever that meant at the time (1968). The form of this wearable pod resembles the compound eye of arthropods, seasoned with the ever-present space-age visual vocabulary that anticipated a technological future that was just around the corner. This object was a materialization of science fiction, the popular way of designating the visionary, techno-heavy aesthetic that took the film and literary industries by storm back then. Arthropods was, in fact, the identity name that designated the brief -if intense- international movement of architects and designers that attempted to define a new humanism based on a social order in which design would be a bottom-up –rather than a top-down- universal right. This humanism materialized by means of homemade, temporary, environment-changing, participatory, experiments and pod-like apparatuses such as the Environment Transformer. Objects became catalysts, activators, short-lived mediators that allowed society to catch a glimpse of a future in which design, science and technology formed the magic triad, the fundamental, all-encompassing social foundation that allowed free expression.
