reboot fellowship meeting #2

imagining new futures

if you could collect any statistic about yourself on a yearly basis, what would it be?

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(does not have to be “measurable”)

speculative design

“With speculative design, we start by asking, Is this a good idea? Before asking, How do we make it happen?”

what is speculative design?

“In a typical design setting, designers create products and services that are sold to consumers.

In a speculative design setting, designers create artifacts and prototypes meant to provoke thought and reflection. Speculative design operates on a more conceptual and philosophical level, by inviting us to question how new technologies might alter our everyday lives, and how they might impact our futures.”

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types of speculative design exercises

1. Scenario building
2. Backcasting
3. Artifacts from the future
4. Futures wheel
5. Fictional narrative

afrofuturism

Historically, sci-fi isn’t super diverse.

• OG sci-fi writers (Asimov, Stephenson) were mostly white men�
• Corporations hire sci-fi writer consultants to imagine how their company will impact the next 50+ years -- cool, but also pro-corporate. �
• Who’s doing the work of imagining safe, equitable, and liberatory futures for marginalized people?

Why aren’t there more SF Black writers? There aren’t because there aren’t. What we don’t see, we assume can’t be. What a destructive assumption.

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• Octavia Butler

what is afrofuturism?

Coined by Mark Dery in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future”: �speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture

Pop culture examples:

• Black Panther
• Get Out
• Kindred

"[Afrofuturism is] my community giving itself room and permission to dream about possibilities. We're moving from a space of surviving the day-to-day to imagining the futures we want to see, and then crafting maps and guides and taking steps to create that future...starting now.”

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• Maurice Broaddus

speculation time

grab some pen and paper (or a blank doc)

in 2030, knowledge workers go fully remote…

Questions to consider:

• How will this impact non-remote workers? What inequities arise?
• What will our cities/towns look like, demographically and geographically?
• What new technologies ( “good” and “bad”) might be developed?

Spend 10 minutes brainstorming the probable and the preferable futures:

• Possible
• Plausible
• Probable
• Preferable

Take 10 minutes to share your envisioned future with your breakout group.

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Feel free to take notes, ask questions, and add components of peers’ worlds to your own!

now, let’s tell a story…

Write a narrative scene from the perspective of a single character in your world, encountering a technology-related problem or dilemma.

Don’t worry about:

• Your world not being fully fleshed out
• Not having research/evidence to back up your scenarios
• Writing quality - this is a brainstorming exercise

Take 10 minutes to outline or write a scene…

Return to your breakout group to read/share your scene.

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How might your characters interact with each other? What similarities do you notice? What new perspectives were revealed to you?