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Design Fiction as a Pedagogic Practice: On Week 3 readings

“The transformative potential of Utopia depends on locating it in the future, on thinking through the process of transformation from the present, and identifying the potential agents of transformation”
Ruth Levitas in Tom Moylan, Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination.

As an English tutor to 8 beautiful students I found this week’s reading particularly thrilling. I love the idea of education as an attempt to envision tomorrow, and more practically to give kids the skills to do so- Ward’s ‘complex set of actors in order to move our fictions to the realm of the real’. For me, I think about my students envisioning the world of tomorrow as their SAC or exam, a future just out of their reach. At the moment they see it as quite a dystopic wasteland of literary grief, but with my help as an educator I want to give them the tools to make this future harder, better, faster, stronger to bring in some Kanye (Ok, perhaps not harder but the lyric would be incomplete).

As Ward says, my student’s ‘work is a side effect of learning’. Their mistakes serve as catalysts for a Rocky-esque comeback, though I hope as their coach I too do not have a heart attack and die just before their SAC (touch wood).

On a different note, I love the readings notion of ‘fiction as a testing ground for reality’. It’s quite weird watching clips of 2001: A Space Odyssey and seeing just a casual iPad. Obviously, Kubrick’s test of this new technology pretty much worked. Also, I’m a bit freaked out watching Blade Runner and reading into the fact that we’re in a dystopian future where Eastern cultures reign supreme at least culturally. As our blessed PM K-Rudd has stated, ‘it’s totes the Asia Century guys #YOLO’ (keeping the young peeps engaged). On the other side of Politics, Turnbull in his 2011 address to the London school of economics also stated that our future lies in China. Isn’t it interesting that Blade Runner’s Americany looking city (maybe Chicago?) is soaked in Eastern influences, right down to the noodles Han Solo nibbles on broodingly. On another level, Blade Runner is set on planet Earth which has been left behind for the new planet with less pollution, only the rich are allowed to pitch their tent there and everyone else just has to meander about in the rainy wasteland squatting in grand new york brownstones. Oooooo, could this be our future? All this makes me think that Blade Runner is a great example of Design Fiction. Perhaps Back to the Future is not, as I always am outraged I have no hovercraft to glide me to my Networked Media unlecture on a Tuesday.

Whatevs Spielberg, give me some Ridley anyday.

 

Small change and caffeine: On Uni breaks

I say a prayer of thanks as the aroma of the blessed bean wakes up and fills my senses. You can almost smell the old yellowing books amongst the caffeine and croissants.

What a bitter irony it is, I think, that the piercing cry of the coffee machine is the thing that will deliver me from this pain I have in my head and this weight I feel over my eyelids as the swanston st trains rattle by.

Fashion forward RMIT students sip their lattes as their scarf sporting tutors mill about looking academic. Everyone who works here looks like they’ve just gotten back from Rio and has an epic story to tell.

Whilst waiting against the brightly decorated bench I peer across at the RMIT green brain and wonder what on earth it means.

‘Holly’ an angel in a grey t shirt calls, ‘have a great day darlin’.

The place is so cool that I don’t even mind being called darlin by a 30 year old man.

Mean Streets: On Being an impoverished Uni Student

This is poverty.

Toasting Asian Beer Cafe’s genius Ladies night strategy with multiple guzzles of 1 dollar champagne. Let it be known, it is from South Australia.

Shimmying through ticket barriers hot on the heels of paying, usually elderly, commuters and exploiting the paternal qualities of male ticket inspectors if caught.

I will let a man hit on me for a gin and tonic. The promise of an ebullient tang of bitters and lime will negate any unwanted playful touching of the hair or face, and I will surrender my dignity and pride as he did when he made the decision to wear a sports sandal to a bar.

$7.50 is a lot if you are 19 years old with no job or verified skills and a history of impulsively quitting jobs in a frenzy of empowered entitlement.

Why should one have to work from the toe jam up upon entry into the workforce? Mopping and scrubbing floors with no cartoon birds to underscore the whimsy, starting a 12 hr 6am shift having got home 6 hours earlier, appearing ditzy as a pre requisite for being female and making a mistake in the hospitality business, burning and bruising your arms on hot trays and accidentally looking like a heroin addict, being so afraid of messing up a family’s fine dining experience that you plunge the corner of a plate into the temple of their frail grandmother.

It’s just unbearable. The orgasmic rush of quitting a job you hate lasts approximately 30 seconds until you animorph into an adult child living at home in a nice suburb who may or may not still be reimbursed for unpacking the dishwasher. Ooooopps, you think, I am a privileged white girl, and I don’t even have the tousled ombre waves of my reality tv counterparts.

I’m not saying that upon wanting financial independence- in my case the ability to buy food everywhere and all the time, to buy alcohol everywhere and all the time and to afford the maintenance of a strong, classic brow- young people should just be able to whip out and get a job as a CEO or Yo Chi cashier. This is ludicrous. Society works because qualified people are assigned particular roles and can carry them out because they have been taught in some formal way how to do them. If people’s upwards of 15 years of education didn’t propel them towards a job, society would crumble. This is my understanding anyway, my point is young people shouldn’t feel entitled to work in awesome jobs if they don’t have the experience or training to deserve them. However, why must the virginal employee have it drummed into them that being treated poorly is simply a pre requisite for entering the workforce?

Our first few bosses will become psychological bedfellows with our memories of our early exes, evidence of our youthful naivety and charming potential to be casually exploited.

‘I can’t believe I worked at the drive thru of Red Rooster’ will soon carry the same sentiment as ‘I can’t believe I went out with a guy who wore velcro sports sandals/whose favourite singer was Taylor Swift/who met me on a blind date and immediately left.

As we grow wiser and gain legitimacy to make important decisions, the people we go out with will change and our jobs will get better. We will be able to pay for alcohol, food and a benebrow in theory, but we won’t want to anymore, it’ll just be boring stuff like taxes, a collection of kitten heeled Kumpfs for the office…. and a solo winery tour for me and all my cats.

First Impressions

As a Professional Communication student, I sometimes feel as though I am drowning in the flood of technical skills my Media student friends bring to their courses. I want to write Media texts, but in a different way to them. Instead of utilising incredible practical skills and amazing equipment, what i want to do it literally write. Thus, I am ecstatic at the blog component of this course!! Of course, I will quickly discover that all is not what it seems as I delve more into a quest for technical proficiency in coding and designing my blog and learning to embed media and other fancy things. In any case, I have always wanted to ‘blog’, to use the word as a verb instead of a noun, to do, to write, to network!