Unlecture, Week 4: Play
This week’s lecture extended on design fiction, aiding us in further developing and understanding the core ideas and takeaway messages attributed to the topic. I rated this lecture a very solid 8.5/10. (Also, shout out to Adrian for letting us use laptops. Thanks, hombre.)
Takeaway messages:
- ‘Imagined futures’
An important aspect of design fiction is the way it allows us to perceive the futures. Why is this important to a cohort of future media practitioners? Precisely because it enables us – or at least encourages us – to envision what our careers might look like in the future. For example, Adrian encourages us to ask ourselves what our careers might look like in 2015 and 2020. I feel that the practise of design fiction in this sense is helpful in reinforcing the idea that our industry is incredibly volatile and that we need to be on our toes at all times. - Design fiction as a problem solving tool
It’s a way that we can approach ‘wicked problems’ in our world like asylum seekers and global warming. - Design fiction is used by Google, and people are being hired as ‘design thinkers’
I found it fascinating that arguably the biggest company of the millennium actually implements design fiction as a part of its practice by letting their workers take one day of the working week to drop their assigned tasks and work on whatever they please. That’s 20% of Google’s production time simply spent engaging in a kind of design fiction activity. Amazing. - ‘I don’t know’ as a legitimate answer
I thought this candid comment summarised the nature of networked media. This subject isn’t set in stone, and it’s not meant to be. What’s that thing about networked media being a boat in open water again? - Its inherent sense of play
Design fiction is all about experimentation, imagination and uncertainty. Three words that are the major cornerstones of media at the moment, and three words that we need to embrace rather than fear.
(There’s nothing symbolic about this GIF I just really like tacky internet art)
