Alternative presents and speculative futures
Hello!
It is almost two months ago since I started my new life in Denmark ( I am Italian) and began my studies at Design School Kolding.
I actually moved to Kolding in May 2013 because I was an EVS volunteer at the children's cultural center Nicolai for børn. Through this experience, I learned about the school and I decided to apply for the master's programme in Communication Design.
And now ....... here I am.
The university organization is quite different from the Italian one. Usually you follow several courses at the same time but here, we focus on one course at a time.
During the first 4 weeks we were catapulted into the real working world. Thanks to the course "Advanced Expertise" we had the honor to collaborate with three international design studios: Bruce Mau Design, the Brand Union and the Motor. Read about it here.
Now, I'm living in the future ... yes, you read it right ... in the future! Because I am attending the course Future Spaces!
The course will rely on a mix of methods from speculative design, design fiction and visual anthropology.
Design fiction is about imagining future, exploring and speculating, visualizing how the world could look like and imagining possible worlds, using science fiction, utopias and dystopias, exploring alternative forms of society, spaces and the re-setting of human conditions, based on imagination, the ability to imagine other worlds to reflect, critique, provoc and inspire. It is about liberating design practice from narrow market-driven values, consumerist ideologies, political power, economical constraints and the technological possibilities of the here and now.
We are working in teams. My group is made up of two industrial designers and two comunication designers, and during the first phase we were working on four small assigments starting from the overall what-if scenario: “Dark city”, which is what people will call Kolding in a not so distant future. Planet Earth has been emptied of all fossil fuels, nuclear power belongs to the past and surprisingly solar energy and wind power has been given up on due to a climatic defect that no environmental scientist could have predicted.
Sometimes working in a group is not so easy...and we have had some discussion but it was ok because we can learn from that.
For each assignment we produced a huge quantity of materials: speculatives objects, sketches, mock-ups and storyboard.
The result is an amazing, speculative scenario and a prototype depending on a new form of electricity, produced by people. Our character is a bio-engineered person. She is an inventor, she is perfect and has electricity in her body as all the other bio engineered people that live in the future have. But she also has compassion so she decides to help the natural born people to have energy.
Our challenge was to design a device for her that makes it possible to collect energy from the bio-engineered people to share this with the natural born humans so they can survive in the dark city. She has devoted her life to inventing solutions to save the natural borns from the regime and the darkness. She is the only bio-engineered that has been able to do this. But now, in 2081 she has to pass on her knowledge to a new hero of the future, so we have made a sort of guide to explain what the new hero has to do and why.
I will suggest you to watch this documentary. It was really inspiring for me. And the movie Gattaca.