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Emerge: Artists + Scientists Redesign the Future
Workshops
Emerge invites participants to explore and work through the implications of Futures@ASU research through hands-on, future-oriented workshops. Want to be invited as a dirty-hands participant? Email us at emerge2012@asu.edu telling us your interests, abilities and which workshops most light you up.
- Design Fiction: “Design fictions” are objects, videos and performances – firmly grounded in technological reality – that resemble visitations from the future meant to roll home movies on the inside of our skulls about how we might desire our future to be. This is not just about gear, it’s about narrative. The Design Fiction group participants include: Bruce Sterling (coordinator), Julian Bleecker, co–founder of Near Future Laboratory, a design–to–think studio and Stuart Candy, senior foresight and innovation specialist at Arup, a global firm of designers, planners, engineers, consultants and technical specialists.
- Our Bytes Our Brains: How Do We Regain a Human Direction
to Technology?
As Churchill taught us, we shape what we build, and afterwards, what we build shapes us. Much has been made of the Digital Age we have created. But how is it reshaping what it means to be thinking individuals and societies?
The Emerge workshops include:
Literally Creating the Future
The Digital Culture building has state–of–the–art fabrication spaces. An amazing amount of what you can imagine, we can build. Fast. Julian Bleecker, of design fiction fame, will lead a group of 15 ASU faculty, students and invited guests in creating design fictions that are physically tangible, leading to a design fiction narrative.
Monumental Performance
Stuart Candy, also a leading light of design fiction, Jake Dunagan of the Institute for the Future and 20 ASU faculty, students and invited guests will create a monument that seems to have been zapped from the future. Much as the obelisk in Arthur Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” casts a kind of noetic force field that exerts an evolutionary magnetism on the apish proto–humans at the Dawn of Man, so will this monument drag all conversations in its ambit into a forthcoming era.
Humanist Narratives for Energy
Gary Dirks of ASU LightWorks and Clark Miller of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes will host a workshop exploring the future of energy in Arizona to 2030. Thinking beyond technological pathways, this workshop will involve a rich exploration of energy landscapes and the disruptive social, political and economic drivers that dominate the scene. Challenging, plausible and logical scenarios will be crafted.
Sci–Fi Prototyping: Designing the Future
Join Intel futurist Brian David Johnson as he works the powerful relationship science fiction has with science fact. Learn how these stories inspire dialog and ideas about new technologies and explore how “The Tomorrow Project,” a global initiative co–sponsored by Intel, promotes the exploration of science fact using science fiction. Participants will receive copies of the new book, “Tomorrow Project Anthology,” in addition to Johnson’s “Science Fiction Prototyping.”
Games and Impact
Sasha Barab and Alan Gershenfeld will imagine an Emerge game and begin a design jam around a vision mockup that will be shared as a verbal walk-through and video. Artists, designers and programmers will come up with the vision and roll it into a conceptual design. We will work in the design space at the ASU Learning Sciences Institute. The ASU Center for Games and Impact will support the design effort.
Starting With the Universe: Design Science Now
Technology studies scholar Gretchen Gano and media artist David McConville will hitch cosmic models to design problems in the age of the Anthropocene, an era of unprecedented global change induced by human activities. This session of immersive theater is inspired by Buckminster Fuller's Design Science process and builds on the activities of the Worldviews Network, a collaboration of pioneering institutions committed to integrating visual systems and design thinking.
I Know Where We Stand Game
It's the future. You know where everyone is. How does this change how you do your work, live your life, spend your money, gather information, share knowledge, express your politics? Will "playing with others" be the norm? Join game and experience designer Ken Eklund (Zorop, Giskin Anomaly, World Without Oil), collaborating with ASU faculty Mina Johnson-Glenberg and the AME Serious Embodied Games for Learning team and explore how to create the games that collectively might bring on the much-anticipated "Triumph of the Commons." Open to 20 playful people. SMALLab, ASU's cutting-edge immersive mixed-reality games space, will be the hub of activity that reaches out across the ASU campus.
Seeing Beyond Ourselves: Present as Past, Speaking to the Future
Imagine we dial back to 1912, and ask people: One hundred years from now, what is rare? What is precious? What is obsolete? What are the new norms for identity, the body, geography, and language? Now, informed by that time travel, suppose we return to the present and write letters to future historians about our dreams and fears for 2112, addressing similar questions. We’ll then brainstorm future artifacts from our present civilization and create forensic photographs of such objects, using both studio lighting on real objects and appropriated images stripped of their context from the internet. Suppose we turn the results of these social experiments into videos, stills, objects, and even that venerable technology (gasp!) a book. That’s part of the array of activities at the heart of the “Seeing Beyond Ourselves” workshop run by mixed media artists Julie Anand and sustainability scholar and artist Edgar Cardenas.
Crafting Archeology from the Future
Desktop 3D printing has the potential to disrupt the creation of “things” the way the Industrial Age transformed hand crafts. In this workshop, do–it–yourselfer and science, technology and society Professor Dave Conz, workshop leader Daniel Erasmus (Shell’s GameChanger Team) and 15 ASU faculty and students will build artifacts on a 3D printer to capture the material make–up of alternative futures. Beginning with plausible scenarios, participants will design and print some everyday objects that could populate 2040.
