Basic prompt: Speculate a technology.
Imagine a piece of technology that doesn’t yet exist. What will its social impact be? How will it participate in the structures of race, gender, and labor? Will it encourage structural change, retrench inequality, do something different? You can use text, images, video, and/or audio to describe your technology. Your discussion of its social impact may focus on the design of the technology itself or on the different ways it will be taken up by people.
This may be a good project to do in pairs or groups – discuss and let me know by Wednesday April 29 if you are planning to collaborate.
Project goals:
1. For you to take the ideas we’ve been discussing all semester and use your imagination to explore them further in a direction that’s of particular interest to you.
2. For you to experiment with the process of speculative design, something that you may wish to take further when you develop your capstone projects.
3. For you to finish the semester with a project that invites you to playfully flex your creative muscles.
Project requirements
The technology you imagine can be small and specific, a subtle change to something that already exists. Or it can be a radical change, something that really alters our world. You are welcome to interpret “technology” as broadly as you like – but if you come up with an idea that’s a bit more ‘out there,’ make sure that you explain how it fits the parameters of the assignment.
You must include the following information about your imaginary technology:
• What does it do, and how does it work (scientific accuracy is not required)?
• Who designed it and for what purpose? Does it get used the way its creators intended, or in different ways?
• What problems does it bring up (things that were already issues and/or new issues caused by the technology?
• How might it be used to reinforce existing structures of race, gender, class, politics, and other social divisions? How might it be used to challenge them?
Practicalities
- Describe your imaginary technology using writing and at least one other medium.
- The written component should be at least 800 words long. So long as it answers the questions, you can write it in any way you like, including fiction.
- The non-written component may be a drawing or photograph; a sound file; a video; a physical object; or anything else you can think of. You may create something from scratch or repurpose something from elsewhere – for example, you might use screenshots from existing technologies to show how your new one would work, with or without adapting them in Photoshop.
- If you wish to work in a group, you may collaborate on the same technology. In this case, you must include at least 800 words of writing and a different non-written component (it can be in the same medium but must be substantially different) per student.
Process
For our workshop day on Wednesday May 6, you must have the non-written part of your project completed. You’ll present this to the class, along with your answers to the questions above.
On Friday May 8, post your final version of the project to the blog.