Products for a dystopian future: This designer imagines tools for a world where women have no rights

It's a truism that's driven sales of tabloids and chocolate bars since the invention of the check-out line: sometimes you don't know you need something until you're looking at it.

Take this gizmo, for instance: a secret "Bra-corder" — gathering audio 24/7, for when someone demands corroborating evidence.

Or maybe you'd really love a lifetime supply of "Eau du Back Off."

Does it smell like sweet justice? Freshly printed restraining orders? A box of dead cats? Who's to say! But whatever it is, it's 100 per cent effective and now available in roll-on.

Meagan Durlak, 34, is a Canadian designer who lives and works in New York, and she's the one-woman Sharper Image store behind both of those items.

Neither's for sale, however — and it's entirely possible they never will be. But after watching the Brett Kavanaugh story unfold over the last few weeks, Durlak hit a breaking point.

I kept thinking, what would the future look like if women had even less rights than we even have today?- Meagan Durlak, designer

"Women's rights became a political issue," she says. "I was just feeling really frustrated because at the end of the day, discrimination and assault should be agnostic to a political leaning."

"I was just thinking about all the moments in my life where I feel I've personally faced some degree of like assault, or I felt uncomfortable, or I felt like I wasn't being treated the way I wanted to be treated."

So having a "make-y, designer mind," she turned that frustration into an eight-item line of fictional products. They're joke-y, so you know. (There's no way something called an "Asshole Test" isn't, and don't ask what sort of tissue sample's required for that one.) But they're all informed by serious issues — harassment, assault, discrimination — the sort of aggressions experienced by women every day. Last week, Durlak posted pictures of her prototypes on Instagram.

The collection, packaged in very-2018 colourway of lapis blue, navy and Millennial Pink, is called Women Without Rights, and the gadgets are funny, empowering — and also, sadly, kind of useful.

As she writes on Instagram: "I kept thinking, what would the future look like if women had even less rights than we even have today? I mean, fuq. Then I thought, what would it look like if we started to take our power back in every uncomfortable situation even if we didn't have 'rights?'"

"So, I just started drawing, making and writing, as a way to dissect what was on my mind."

Everything you'll see in her Instagram post is technically a creative re-boxing of a dollar store find — so yeah, that "No Means No" Hypnotizer isn't going to work as advertised.

Instead, Durlak says the collection serves a different sort of function. Think of the gadgets as conversation starters, she suggests.

"Like, telling the story of a moment when you would use Eau du Back Off, right? It becomes your prop to be able to tell the story of an experience you've had," she says.

"The violation that we experience, and the normalization of it, I feel like those moments are so intangible. I just became really interested in what it would look like to make some of those moments visible."

There's something very powerful in having an object, whether it's real or not, to really make an experience real.- Meagan Durlak, designer

Durlak says that she plans to share more inventions on Instagram in the coming days, and she's thinking of opening the project up to the public — though it's still too early to say what form it'll ultimately take.

"I think what I would love is to not just make this speculative project about women's rights," she says. "I think it's just about the rights of individuals who are marginalized and feel like they are not seen."

As it is, every item is very open to interpretation. How you use them, and why you'd use them, are up to the viewer's imagination.

"I think that's kind of the cool part," she says. "It doesn't make it all about me and my experience — it makes it about an experience that is collective and shared and for many different types of people."

"There's something very powerful in having an object, whether it's real or not, to really make an experience real. And be able to show it to make that experience real."

Take a look.