Watching the second video in Bruce Sterling’s article on design fictions, I was in awe. Of course these applications for different styles of glass are only fictional, but they somehow seem within our reach. The fact that someone has thought of them is a good enough start for me!

The other day when I got to dancing, one of the girls was telling a story of this amazing new gadget that her brother had just bought that day. I can’t remember the exact name but I can most definitely remember it’s functions as they drew a gobsmacked reaction from everyone listening.

She described this “box” that you place in front of the TV and interact with.. You can’t actually see the box with which you are interacting, but it is there and allows you to use your hands to play games for example “cut the rope”, in which you have to use your hand to slice the rope on the TV screen. It sounds like a really simple game but the idea of being able to play it without actually touching a screen or controller is mouth-watering.

In a sense I thought of this as design-fiction.. I still haven’t seen the proof that it exists and I can hardly believe that it could work the way that she explained it, but this is what I think is so amazing about it. Many people have probably imagined having a piece of technology that worked along these lines and letting their imagination run wild would have lead them to create a piece of design fiction of their own. However, it is this design fiction that eventually leads to the actual creation. I loved watching the video about A Day In Glass, because it allows me to imagine a life with these inventions helping me out. It would be incredible! As Sterling says “it is cool to imagine if they existed”.

What is scary is that I am sure in one hundred years this “box” my friend told me about will be as uninteresting and useless to the population as the first mobile phone is to us now, and an I Pad will be a relic of the past. However for now it is totally futuristic and so are the gadgets seen in A Day In Glass, so I am going to make the most of appreciating their intelligence while I can.

This week I didn’t manage to take that many notes during the un-lecture, however one topic towards the end of the un-lecture really struck me as blatantly obvious but fascinating, and it was in relation to Adrian’s word game example. When he asked which creature was the odd one out out of the kangaroo, koala, kookaburra and possum.. I thought to myself well obviously it isn’t possum because that’s too obvious, but the thing is.. it is only obvious because I am literate. Here I am thinking that it is a trick question when really Adrian was trying to show the effect that print media has had on knowledge.

I had never really considered the idea of an ‘oral culture’- a community where communication is solely communicated by spoken word, where all knowledge is transmitted through way of speaking, listening, gesturing, singing and dancing. It seems like a difficult concept nowadays as I sit here staring deep into my laptop screen, however there are still communities out there living in such a way, for example on North Sentinal Island, where locals have been virtually untouched by modern civilization.

These locals may think that there are certain members of their community who have infinite knowledge.. as they know ‘everything’ there is to know about their community. However what we know today is that nobody can ever know EVERYTHING, no matter how high their ATAR score is..