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Visualising The Invisible - Feedback

Reflections and feedback on Visualizing the Invisible scenario workshop

From the listening circle

Final Reflections on July 11, 2014

painton

Design magazine created by Ivy (9 years old), as her reflection on visualizing the invisible in four scenarios

Follow-up discussion

Discussion on July 15, 2014.

Aim of the discussion: move from the particular experience of creating scenarios to reflect on how that could be generalized and then applied in other contexts.

Meditate on how our scenarios were not “mere” fiction, but rather, were speculative, or, How to keep the future REAL:

  1. five years is a realistic time frame
  2. built on our own values, what matters to us (we chose our change drivers)
  3. based on real pasts, real traumas, real disasters, real memories, real wars – all echoes of the past (carried into the future)
  4. takes up the present problem of “fitting in” or “belonging,” the relation of the individual to the collective
  5. echoed our current issues and concerns (do we recognize our present in this future?)
  6. continuity: not big changes, but exaggerations, intensifications, vectors, or directions from the present to future; smoothness
  7. the lenses through which we think are the same: political, social, economic, historical, cultural
  8. many of our assumptions, hierarchies, and freedoms stayed the same in the future
  9. the need to feel, experience, enact, role-play, walk up to the future (ladder) from here
  10. utilized many of the same basic stories, mythologies
  11. our relationship to other people still defined who we are
  12. maintaining an ethical connection to that future was important for speculating

What tools and strategies did we gain for visualizing?

  1. using steps
  2. keeping it small; make larger things into smaller pieces
  3. examine our concepts (make them smaller too); figure out what they mean to us (e.g., sustainable, bio-diverse)
  4. collaboration, multiple perspectives
  5. improvisation, enactment, feeling
  6. recognize our presumptions (we can do this by reflecting on the first emotional reaction: it will reveal what we value)
  7. constraints help (e.g., time, conceptual, climate, structure, resources). Too much freedom isn’t helpful.
  8. multiple sessions (revisiting differently each time)
  9. organized reflection time

What would I add to these? What is my personal take-away?

  1. I can consider what in the process can be loose, but where things need to be really clear (change drivers!)
  2. Collectively, we made somewhat arbitrary choices for change drivers; individually, they will be more clear and defined.
  3. In order to connect myself to the future, I will write more.
  4. Feel how it feels (role-playing).

How do you see yourself using these in your project, this course, or more broadly?

  1. The interview process: when I hear myself echoed back through another person (the interviewer), I am changed by their story. This effect of our combined thoughts is productive.
  2. In urban planning, we are always trying to figure out what it is we didn’t know we knew. These strategies will help us find these.
  3. I now have the means to visualize a real present that I am not a part of.
  4. In my final project on graffiti, I can use the notion of change drivers to think through the relation of government funding of art and graffiti as a “disrespected” art.
  5. I can visualize the future impact of a given design, and loop that back into its production.
  6. In civil engineering, we are always looking to the future, to find the problems you didn’t even know you had; these strategies for visualizing definitely help with that!
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When all is said and done…