My, my, my. What a difference a week, some new ideas, the return of a tutor, and a set list of questions makes.

This week’s unlecture finally delivered. While I’m still no expert on Design Fiction or the actor-network theory, I can honestly say at the end of the hour I knew more than I did at the start. No doubt this is largely due to the fact that we managed to remain on-topic for the majority of the unlecture, thus ensuring that the conversation was informative and easy to follow. I particularly enjoyed the discussion about forecasting and using our own incentives and understanding of design fiction to create ideas for the future. Looking forward into the future/great-big-terryfyingly-vague-abyss is not something I am particularly comfortable with and yet the way it was approached in this unlecture made it seem less complicated to me. I find myself looking at things in a similar fashion to Adrian in that I like to look backwards and understand what’s behind me before trying to think of something new. Perhaps that’s about to change…

I also found the banter between Adrian and Brian incredibly valuable as the two perspectives on the same idea helped me to create a context for it in my head. Having a wider understanding of Design Fiction allowed me to consolidate my own understanding as well as encourage me to consider it from new angles.

To earn my full congratulations though, I think Adrian should take a leaf from Google’s e-book and implement a new rule for RMIT: One day per week, instead of doing readings, meeting up with group members, attending early classes and awkwardly waiting outside lecture theatres making small talk with that one person we kind of know from class last semester whose name we’ve forgotten we should just be allowed to create. No rules, no assessment criteria, no due dates. Give us an entire semester to impress you and see what we come up with.