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Visualising The Invisible - Feedback
(From our discussion on the workshop)
Meditate on how our scenarios were not “mere” fiction, but rather, were speculative, or, How to keep the future REAL:
- five years is a realistic time frame
- built on our own values, what matters to us (we chose our change drivers)
- based on real pasts, real traumas, real disasters, real memories, real wars – all echoes of the past (carried into the future)
- takes up the present problem of “fitting in” or “belonging,” the relation of the individual to the collective
- echoed our current issues and concerns (do we recognize our present in this future?)
- continuity: not big changes, but exaggerations, intensifications, vectors, or directions from the present to future; smoothness
- the lenses through which we think are the same: political, social, economic, historical, cultural
- many of our assumptions, hierarchies, and freedoms stayed the same in the future
- the need to feel, experience, enact, role-play, walk up to the future (ladder) from here
- utilized many of the same basic stories, mythologies
- our relationship to other people still defined who we are
- maintaining an ethical connection to that future was important for speculating
What tools and strategies did we gain for visualizing?
- using steps
- keeping it small; make larger things into smaller pieces
- examine our concepts (make them smaller too); figure out what they mean to us (e.g., sustainable, bio-diverse)
- collaboration, multiple perspectives
- improvisation, enactment, feeling
- recognize our presumptions (we can do this by reflecting on the first emotional reaction: it will reveal what we value)
- constraints help (e.g., time, conceptual, climate, structure, resources). Too much freedom isn’t helpful.
- multiple sessions (revisiting differently each time)
- organized reflection time
What would I add to these? What is my personal take-away?
- I can consider what in the process can be loose, but where things need to be really clear (change drivers!)
- Collectively, we made somewhat arbitrary choices for change drivers; individually, they will be more clear and defined.
- In order to connect myself to the future, I will write more.
- Feel how it feels (role-playing).
How do you see yourself using these in your project, this course, or more broadly?
- 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.
- 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.
- I now have the means to visualize a real present that I am not a part of.
- 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.
- I can visualize the future impact of a given design, and loop that back into its production.
- 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!