Designing Post-Technological Futures for Everything
Syllabus⇝
Following a collective learning-by-doing approach, the students will explore, discuss, reflect, ideate, and exchange perspectives, questions, and thought experiments, while exercising their collective imaginations with long-term, critical and planetary mindsets to navigate the complexity, scale, and speed of change of the multidimensional implications that the digital economy has in the environmental emergency.
Using The Everything Manifesto as a meta-brief, participants will have the opportunity to learn how to use hypothetical questions to develop useful fiction stories about how everyday life can change in the next billion seconds, following methodologies where they can practice collective ideation, decision making, and other collaborative approaches.
Deliverables⇝
Digital posters + Proto–videos
Additional Resources⇝
Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows
Dark Matter and Trojan Horses - Dan Hill
Exposing the magic of Design - John Kolko
Frame Innovation - Kees Dorst
A more beautiful question - Warren Berger
Design, When everybody Designs - Ezio Manzini
Design for the Real World - Victor Papanek
Critical Zones - Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel
Leading from the Emerging Future - Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer
Modality: The course will be 100% screen-based, using Zoom⇝
Output: Digital posters + Proto–videos⇝
Bibliography:⇝
‘Provisions - Observing & Archiving COVID-19’ by Site Magazine
‘Slowdown Papers’ by Dan Hill
'Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime' by Bruno LaTour
‘Poetics of Relation’ by Édouard Glissant
‘The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
‘Everything is Someone’ by Simone Rebaudengo and Joshua Noble
‘Black Quantum Futurism Theory & Practice, Volume I’ by Rasheedah Phillips
‘Beyond Nature and Culture’ by Philippe Descola
‘Stories of your Life and Others’ by Ted Chiang
‘A question of tech’ by Gauthier Roussilhe
‘The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900’ by David Edgerton
‘Goodbye Uncanny Valley’ by Alan Warburton
Faculty⇝
Andres Colmenares (CO/ES) is the co-founder of IAM, the creative research and strategic design lab helping citizens and organisations make responsible decisions by using futures as tools to anticipate challenges and opportunities, while exploring the socio-ecological impacts of digital technologies and the internet(s) through collective learning initiatives, partnerships and commissioned projects. He is also strategic advisor for WeTransfer’s Supporting Act Foundation, director of the Master in Design for Responsible Artificial Intelligence systems at ELISAVA and faculty member of the Master in City & Technology at IAAC.