Paola Ortiz Garcia
Our Invisible Neighbors
My thesis explores how interior design can foster empathy toward nonhuman species, using rats—NYC's maligned but persistent residents—as subjects and metaphors. My hotel design prompts guests to imagine what a day in the life of a NYC rat truly means, navigating hostility, exclusion, and survival in spaces designed to thwart their existence. By encouraging people to consider a serious ecological and ethical issue through an immersive experience, my hotel design helps facilitate the human-nonhuman cohabitation found in cities like New York.
Through my intervention at the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum, visitors adopt a rat's perspective, confronting stereotypes and discovering multispecies interconnections. The project uses tactile materials, altered scales, and disorienting soundscapes to transform guests from observers to participants in a designed experience of empathy that creates a visceral understanding of what it means for species to co-exist—one that intellectual arguments alone cannot bring about.
By centering the experience on that of a rat, the project encourages us to reflect critically on interspecies boundaries and rethink shared urban spaces. It suggests that fostering empathy for the most unwanted among us, we might reconsider the overarching ethics of our built environment.
Significantly, this work addresses the "invisible lines" we draw between ourselves and others, both human and nonhuman, revealing how design can make the unseen visible and challenge our selective perception.
Our Invisible Neighbors reframes interior design as a medium for uncovering relationships and building empathy across species and social divides, suggesting that by beginning with those we fear or reject, we can transform the ways we design, inhabit, and care for our shared world.
