Plastic Futures 1
Designing For Change: plasticity and futuring
Poster for Plastic Futures 1
The Plastic Futures 1 research seminar ran between March and May 2009 with RMIT Masters of Architecture students. Weekly sessions aimed to explore temporal experience – relations between the experience of the present, the future, and the deep past. We worked through a series of exercises and/or workshops that expanded and contracted our experiences of time and of the present, while trailing cultural landscapes for the issues of looming significance in the coming 40 to 50 years. This involved attempts to perform fictional future scenarios.
The structure of weekly activities can be seen below, including links to more information, photos, etc.
Posts relating to this seminar can be found under the ‘Plastic Futures 1′ category (drop down from top right corner).
Weekly research activity was structured as indicated below. Some links are to our RMIT password protected wiki where we can share info that can’t be published (for copyright reasons). Apologies to those who try, but can’t access this part.
Part 1 – practices of temporal expansion and contraction
1. Open Innovation and Design Futures.
What is design and design innovation? Where is design practice heading? What might it mean to design the future?
2. Plasticity
(and the architectural contemporary)
Why is plasticity an important notion for thinking about potential futures? How might our contemporary understandings regarding biological plasticity impact upon Darwinian ideas of evolution? How does this offer evidence and impetus to the significant role of design and other cultural speculations?
3. Change and the Now
If we feel ourselves to be in the midst of significant global change (for example, climate and economic change), how can we approach guiding this state-of-change into the future? Might being ‘present’, in the most micro-temporal sense be a key to engaging with change?
4. Scenarios
How should we approach the production of future scenarios? Are we trying to make predictions, encourage positive directions, raise potential, and/or illicit debate?
Part 2 – stepping into the future
5. Our world in 2049
How might we imagine ourselves, our environments, our lives, as a group of more eldery people, in 2049?
6. Becomings; building a character on Facebook.
7. Diagramming the Situation
Teams:
1. Diagramming Histories – Martin, Sergey, Trecia
2. Ecological Bodies – Will, Anita, Pierre
3. Architectural Aggregation – Peter, Girish, Nicholas
(see pdf on wiki for outline on these team questions)