Transmission 006
This is a newsletter for designers and time travel facilitators. It has insights about the speculative practice and tools we use in our method that they could try as well. Today we start on Vitamin D.
This transmission is focused in design research.
Speculative scenarios are often unusual, curious, occasionally even disturbing, but desirable and attractive prompts that create the suspension of disbelief about change. They are open-ended, offer the audience the possibility of personal interpretation, and frequently include humor, which activates the audience on an emotional and intellectual level, in a way similar to literature and film.
Source.
The designer’s challenge during Phase 1 of time traveling (scenario design) is a difficulty from participants to come up with original stories or stories distanced from utopia/dystopia; also when participants feel intimidated to blurt out storylines amongst peers.
Here are writing prompts that could rescue you to get things moving– this week (while researching how to interact with artifacts that we happen to run into) this became our starting point to work; inspired by Flotsam by David Wiesner.
One day you find an object in the street. It fits your hands so you pick it up. It says someone real made it, and it says why but not how. A slip of paper coming from one of its sides tells you that you can and should deconstruct this object. A second piece of paper with a list of questions slides from another side. You start deconstructing while reading the questions, and the whole thing feels like putting together a puzzle in reverse. Once separated, you can see that each piece of this object tells you its emotional origin and a scenario in the future. And one emotional origin is you.
The book prompted us to ask, What if we made another way of engaging with our method by reversing the stages? Would participants get to the same place or show us other findings also obtainable with our creation? (We are using this for PALINDROME).
Phase 3 of time traveling is about rapid-prototyping. Artifacts are a view into a time traveler’s heart and soul (and values and fears and hopes and a conviction that they are indeed creative, a conviction which we as designers must protect at all times).
This is how we make artifacts rapidly, how prototyping works at The Time Travel Agency, or how this weird stuff is created.
In speculative design we communicate ideas with artifacts. During rapid prototyping we think with our hands and build physical or digital objects that contain a fiction, a scenario, a challenge inside that scenario, and a proposed answer.
Last month we worked on a new artifact called ANTENNA. ANTENNA is an interdimensional postal service from the future whose first delivery is 35 postcards from The City of Remote Work. The postcards were created in real time by travelers during a guided tour, and are available to send to friends and family so they too come explore the city (which lives in Miro).
The following is an example of this artifact’s research:
Hiroshi Yoshimura made an album called ‘Music for Nine Post Cards’. His piece traced a direct line between concept and production of ANTENNA in this way: we already had the postcards and were looking for a “conceptual container” for them; when we saw Yoshimura’s connection between music and a story, contained in one postcard, we moved our research to, Which soundtrack would play during the delivery of these postcards? And then, What if the container of this artifact was a delivery service whose first delivery was this?!
We are omitting effervescent parts of the process– lots of texts, lots of walking, lots of emojis and lots of testing if the soundtrack also worked for baking (it did not) but that’s beginning and end.
Here’s Music for Nine Postcards!
What we see when we aren’t seeing into a specific project.
We borrow from film, literature, games, the zeitgeist, the bus…
This transmission’s focus on design research leaves us no choice but to pick a favorite design research piece on the design research process! In Dim the Fluorescents two artists–designers are working on a project, and the filmmaker uses the steps these two women take to exemplify the Research and Production process, especially its emotional dimension.
Basically: the film is the Process talking and moving around; lovely and great for method reflection.
Bonus: this film is great for speculative designers because the tricky balance between art–design of our work feels heavy at times. We want to help yet the outcome looks artistic yet it’s helpful.
From our community!
Khushboo Balwani & Ellen Anthoni from BrusselAVenir are futures researchers working on how collaborative methodologies can solve social challenges.
Their process is: every six months they select one question to work together with citizens, entrepreneurs, experts, and creatives. With them, they choose the futures they prefer and turn them into stories.
The duo has two ongoing projects: Windows to Bruxsels 2030 (literally windows), and Future Fertilisers, and are casting for studio interns right now.
