Tagged: unlecture

BETA SYMPOSIUM 0.1

The week’s ‘nothing like a lecture’ Symposium was a welcome gear change. Student devised questions posed as prompts for tutors, who then unpacked important ideas from readings and made them relevant. I took many notes. It was productive.

Once again, the question of Design Fiction and how it relates to us at university, popped up. Brian Morris made it clear that Design Fiction is more about the broader ways of making stuff. Design Fiction is an approach to making stuff with motivation and a sense of play:

Design Fiction doesn’t rely on being evidence-based, but makes you re-think what counts as evidence (material you can make use of to speculate about the future but also as much about contemporary worlds we inhabit).

Adrian chimed in saying that large corporations are paying people lots of money to think like designers, like a kind of Speculative Play Time. Currently, it is thought that designers have the right kind of forward-thinking toolkit for dealing with ‘wicked problems’ – the kinds of problems that only create more with every solution, if there is even a solution. Problems facing me, in this context include the rapidly changing nature of media industries, the disruptive nature of the internet and consequently, the continually fragmented engagement with media texts of consumers and audiences. Design Fiction with it’s playful approach to speculation as a practice, provides:

…a robust, simple way to start to think through complexity and those sorts of probelms. Tools to confront the nature of the world we’re going into.

And further on this point, I liked the term imagined futures that came up. It’s almost a better description for Design Fiction. It’s a way to think through possible futures I may be going into. Adrian practices this thinking often in classes – he possesses that ability to think through complex scenarios in an agile (quick and light) way. It’s creative hypothesising. It’s speculative practice.

It was also encouraged in the Symposium to think of ourselves not as content producers, but as knowledge creators. To be an experience designer; to make interactions between users as an experience different to other services. I know this is an important note, and I’m sure the gravity of it will settle on me soon enough.

On the blog, Adrian posed this question:

Simple. What do you think you want to do. (Direct, run a media company, design web sites, invent a reality TV franchise, write screenplays). Got something? Now, it is 2020. Write a design fiction. What do you do in your job in 2020? how do you get paid? what stuff do you make? for what/who? where?…That’s a design fiction question.

Our Wicked Problem

The thought that we as students do not have the agency to pick a DSLR and create content of a decent standard is a lie. Uncle George can do this for free. Why would I put myself in debt to end up on par with Uncle George? It’s our wicked problem. But it also means I should stop being all, “I’m not arty enough to walk around this cool campus with a DSLR around my neck,” and put on a  fucking beret…and that DSLR.

NETWORKED MEDIA: THAT FIRST WEEK

What becomes apparent is that this subject, Networked Media, is quite an abstract one. It began with a lecture, that will continue in the form of an ‘unlecture’. That lecture contained a lecturer, who lectured about not-lecturing, and who described how the designated time and space would be used from Week 2. Unlectures will break down boundaries and change the world by dissolving well established codes of behaviour between lecturer and student, allowing the student to drive the content of the time/space by posing inspiring questions to a panel of tutors.

Actually, it will be a nice change and a bonus if it contributes to my learning more than a traditional lecture would have. A traditional lecture is usually packed with relevant information that I am generally quite motivated to absorb. I’m not sure how much content exists if the form is reliant on students. For the ‘unlecture’ style of learning to contribute to my knowledge acquirement, quality questions will need to be posed to the panel. In order for learning to occur then, a somewhat ‘sharing of the responsibility load’ needs to take place between teachers and students. If it is not to be that teachers make offerings to students in a very ‘one-to-many’ style of closed communication, a ‘two-way symmetrical’ communication needs to take place in lectures to encourage mutual understanding. If shitty questions get asked – I don’t learn anything: that gives me power to drive my own knowledge acquirement.

Beyond Unlectures, this course appears to be largely self-driven. Key terms used to connote the experience of Networked Media might be: non-linear, speculative, creative, imaginary, explorative, self-driven, ludic, experimental, forward-moving, mapless, ruminative…

YEE HAA!

Photo: By author