Narrating Emergent Futures
Syllabus⇝
“The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.“ Harold Clarke Goddard
In this studio, students will explore the impact storytelling has had and continues to have in shaping the world around us. By critically understanding how narratives have shaped the past, students will gain a practical understanding of how to shape their own communications as designers of emergent futures.
Focusing on the communications and documentation styles which will be required of students during the course, we will explore issues of representation, hermeneutics, language and semiotics in the age of hyper-personalisation and post-truth. The studio will help students to navigate the vernacular of Maker Culture and will introduce them to how and why we communicate with machines. The studio will challenge students to critically engage with the layer of intangible culture they create as designers of emergent futures; to make meaning and to situate their practice in the cultural discourse.
Deliverables⇝
The design for a personal website
Personal statement
Additional Resources⇝
Students can start checking out some awesome texts:
No Logo - Naomi Klein
This Changes Everything - Naomi Klein
The Myth Gap - Alex Evans
The Great Hack doco on Netflix
Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)
Theodore Adorno: Culture Industry Reconsidered.
Jacques Derrida
The Century of the Self - Part 1: “Happiness Machines”
Faculty⇝
A Master Arts and Society (University Utrecht) and Bachelor of Design (UNSW), Kate has vast experience in cultural programming, design and open tech fields in Australia and Europe. She has been the communication and dissemination manager for various European research projects at Fab Lab Barcelona concerned with circular economy, open design innovation ecosystems and future cultural heritage. She managed the Distributed Design Platform, a Creative Europe Platform co-funded by the European Commission and currently serves as its strategic advisor. Kate sits on the Executive Board of the Fab City Foundation, as the global initiative’s Strategic Director. She is Faculty of the Master in Design for Emergent Futures at IAAC/ELISAVA, Faculty of the Master in Distributed Design and Innovation and Head of Programming for Interspecies Internet - a global think tank to accelerate interspecies communications.
Multimedia developer, interaction designer & researcher, Mariana Quintero works and develops her practice at the intersection where digital fabrication technologies, digital literacy, and information and computation ethics & aesthetics meet, contributing to projects that investigate how digital information and technologies translate, represent, and mediate knowledge about the world. She is currently a faculty member and part of the strategic team at the Masters in Design for Emergent Futures at IAAC | Fab Lab Barcelona.
Santiago Fuentemilla Garriga , is Master degree in Architecture and postgraduate in digital fabrication and rapid prototyping (Fabacademy). He accumulates more than 15 years of experience in studios (OPR, FHAUS, OPERA, Brullet de Luna associats), designing multidisciplinary projects at an international level. Since 2013 he is part of the IAAC - Fab Lab BCN team, as coordinator and leader of Future Learning Unit (FLU), an area of research, design and implementation of innovative educational models that promote growth, learning and creativity to generate opportunities to achieve the goals and challenges of uncertain futures. FLU participates in private and EU funded research projects such as TEC-LA, Shemakes, Ruractive, DOIT, Phablabs 4.0, Creative Minds, among others. He is director of the global academic programs Fab Academy and Fabricademy, in the Barcelona node, executive board of Fab Learning Academy, and faculty of the Master in Design for Emergent Futures (MDEF) and The Master in Design for Distributed Innovation (MDDI).