Week 4 – Symposium 0.1

Firstly welcome back Brian, love your work.

It was great to see a change of formula in this week’s unlecture turned ‘symposium’. The content was derived from student questions with all four tutors providing different thoughts and ideas.

I thought there were some really interesting points made and that this format will lend itself to a more interactive teaching and learning practice.

Below are some of the take away ideas form the discussion:

1.     What is the practicality of design fiction for people who are not designers? What separates it from science fiction?

Design fiction (DF) involves speculating about the future & contemporary worlds and with a sense of play and creativity it offers diverse ways of making and thinking about stuff.

Typically, science fiction tends to be more technology dependent DF is applied to broader contexts. DF also attempts to acknowledge consequences and effects both positive and negative and is not a ‘perfect’ fix.

Design thinking helps us to prepare for the world we are going to face as design is a future orientated practice. In doing this it is important that designers look back on the past to inform tomorrow’s decisions.

Adrian used an interesting case study, Google’s 20% ‘playtime’ policy for employers, in which they engage in independent speculative projects. Twitter came out of this practice.

2.     As content producers, is it more important to speculate far into the future or pay more attention to the present?

It’s a combination of the two, you can’t have one without the other. In terms of looking forward it’s up to us how far we want to speculate.

Brian suggested that it’s about the concept of originality and used the example of remix culture.

“We’re only one actor in this system.”

3.     How is a network influenced by its constituents? And how does it influence them?

What is a constituent in a network? Network can be considered an “abstract representation of the current state of affairs” and “space, time and knowledge.”

Actor Network Theory: It’s a question of agency.  (Actor: anything that has agency, doesn’t have to be a person, just something that effects the environment.)

It was emphasized that it’s not the content that matters it is the system of communication/service and we should think of ourselves as knowledge creators and not content producers.

4.     What do you think the future of networked media will involve, and how will it benefit us?

Technology has altered social structure. There will no doubt be an extension of what we currently have, just reorganized. But it is almost impossible to know/predict until the technology arrives. A positive is that the scarcity that once surrounded media making and media knowledge has gone.

Perhaps social media will more frequently be used to build up professional profiles?