The Post-Technological Futures of Everything

Summary of the week 7 - The Post-Technological Futures of Everything.




The week with Andres Colmenares has shown us new ways to design, analyze and communicate possible futures using the video. I have also learned the protovideo concept, which means, conceptualize possible futures through existing graphic resources or rapid prototyping.

We started the session with a collaborative drawing exercise where the whole class participated. In the second part Andres explained his IAM project. Then he left some questions:

How can we use the internet to rethink our relationship with the planet and everything else around it?

How can we embrace critical, conscious and post-binary attitudes in knowledge-sharing and consumption experiences?

How can organisations, designers and citizens improve the interelationships between human and everything?

The Everything Manifesto of IAM:

E 🌀 Identity
What if we go beyond static binary mindsets and then understand human identities as dynamic and fluid spectra?

V 🌀 Time
What if we go beyond the obsession for nowness, newness, and short-termness and then apply long-term thinking to better understand and anticipate the social, ethical, and ecological implications of the ways we are using the internet(s)?

E 🌀 Problems
What if we go beyond solutionism and making everything easy, simple, fast by default and then make visible the unpleasant consequences of the vast social and technological systems and infrastructures that make everyday computing possible, embracing the natural and challenging beauty of complex systems with accountability?

R 🌀 Scale
What if we go beyond using the invisible algorithms connecting billions of black mirrors and black boxes to make billions for a few billionaires, and then explore, anticipate and understand the ethical implications that shaping reality for billions of humans has, with an equivalent scale of responsibility?

Y 🌀 Growth
What if we go beyond becoming growth, progress and productivity fans and then start adopting alternative ways to define success such as their contribution to societal wellbeing and sustainable prosperity?

T 🌀 Energy
What if we go beyond producing devices with built-in obsolescence and ignoring the scale of the energy consumption that interconnected physical infrastructures enabling digital platforms and services demand, and then exponentially reduce their e-waste, natural resources consumption and carbon emissions?

H 🌀 Business models
What if we go beyond abusing opaque business models that commodify citizens’ time, attention and data, risking individual and collective privacy and then implement ethical, transparent and fair alternatives, delivering real value to society?

I 🌀 Decisions
What if we go beyond understanding humans only as consumers or users, and then design for and with citizens who have rights and duties, promoting digital literacy, tolerance and solidarity and enabling everyone to make better and more conscious decisions individually and collectively?

N 🌀 Learning
What if we go beyond the obsolete industrial approach to education and then cultivate the potential of life-long learning with collective critical hope at its core

G 🌀 Design
What if we go beyond the selfishness of human-centered-design methodologies and singularity mindsets, aiming then for holistic Earth-driven-design approaches that lead to plurality and solidarity?

Ultimately, the purpose of these questions is not to find the correct answers but instead to try to formulate better questions based on the thought experiments each one suggests, and to use them as tools to understand EVERYTHING better.

What’s everyting?
Everything is all that exists; the opposite of nothing.

We also analyzed Black Mirror and started a series of protovideo chapters with the MDEF class. We organize in groups of ⅘ people by topics of interest according to the IAM Manifesto. The main themes of our team were Growth + Energy. The name of the MDEF series is Zero Sum and there are 4 chapters: Let me in, Are you sure, I feel you, Welcome back and SCI. The objective of the protovideo was to define an episode of the series and investigate the mood, aesthetics, colors, video clips , the voice…
Faculty

Andrés Colmenares (IAM Internet)

Year

11-14/11/2019

Category

Reflection