Where is the future?
Hello!
During the lasts weeks we continued to explore our future scenario. We stayed in the SDU university because we had two weeks of lessons there. The main goal of those two weeks was to be able to locate the future, find a place where we could do an interview ( we went to Nicolai for Børn) and ask them what they think about the future. The teachers gave us some methods that we could use to develop our interview. We started to create a sort of map of ourselves. We drew some objects that meant something to us and we add people that are connect through those objects and some places. In a different paper we wrote down some plans, dreams, hopes and fears for the near and the far future. After that we related the objects, the people and the places to these plans. We had a sort of map and we reflected on that in our group and we figured out that the most important thing to help us to speak about future were the places.
For our interview we also focused a lot on the spaces instead of objects or people. We went to Nicolai for Børn, a creative culture house for children in kolding, to make an interview with Laura who is one of the communicators working there. She gave us an introduction to the house of Nicolai and their various activities for kids in the ages between 2 and 12. We were really interested in finding out more about their goals and missions as an institution, and how she could see the place develop in the future if she could dream freely. She had a lot of great ideas and imagination about the future that we feel really inspired by. The essence of our interview result (the most exiting part) was talking to Laura about how she could imagine and dream about the future of Nicolai for Børn. Thanks to Laura’s imaginative mind we got a lot of nice ideas from her desription of the future. From talking about the physical rooms and spaces in the building of nicolai, Laura started to explain in words how she could imagine these rooms in new ways.
Located in different places in kolding, creating houses like Nicolai in other places of the world etc. It was very powerful to talk about the future also including experiences with the senses and discussing how the basic things that humans enjoy might always be important to include in our daily life. Not only for kids but also for adults. After the interview we spent some time to discuss and share the informations that we had and we use a special method called a-frame: ar folded a4 content inside, pictures and a space for comments. In our 6 e-frames we focused on the most interesting themes that came up in the interview, and we divided the content in to these fields: different design strategies children the future adults nicolai for grown ups play and memory challenges in nicolai hanling the future we had a lot of really interesting comments and suggestions from our class mates. For example: “In many ways children have by nature what designers need to do their work (curiousity, imagination, free thinking).” “Children are the future. Creativity creates future (alternative futures).” “What would make adults play?” “Focus on senses might be an innovating way of evolving. Alternative way to look into the future.”
How to visualize the content from our interview
We challenged ourselves and we decides to create a stop motion video. We wanted to explore the images that we all had in our mind inspired by Laura’s explanation of the future. Using her ideas we experienced how the future city of Kolding might look like with new spaces and possibilities.