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23 posts tagged with "Design Fiction"

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🟠 Des-fi

Design is often seen as a human-driven process, where products, services, and interventions serve as neutral tools for change. However, new materialism challenges this perspective by emphasizing the agency of materials, infrastructures, and systems in shaping society. This article examines the intersection of design, sociology, and new materialist philosophy, exploring how designed artifacts are not merely passive elements but active participants in shaping behaviors, power structures, and cultural shifts. By integrating sociological insights, it calls for a more relational, systemic view of design—one that acknowledges the entanglement of human and non-human forces in the transformation of our world.

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🟠 Des-fi

Design is at a threshold—caught between collapse and renewal. As the complexity of today’s challenges grows, traditional design methods are no longer enough. Climate breakdown, social inequality, and collapsing systems expose the limits of human-centred thinking in addressing wicked problems. The future, like a layered dream, unfolds unpredictably, revealing multiple possibilities.

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🔵 FS 🟠 Des-fi

In the midst of climate crisis, how humanity generates and uses energy counts among the most urgent and far-reaching systemic issues we face. I’m excited to share our latest experiential futures project, Tomorrow’s Energy Today, a series of playful, site-specific interventions designed to help imagine and catalyse energy transition at scale.

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🟠 Des-fi 🔵 FS

A century ago, a little-known series of books about the future tackled everything from science to religion to monogamy. Max Saunders argues that it deserves to be rediscovered – and not just for its striking prescience.

One hundred years ago, towards the end of 1923, the geneticist JBS Haldane published a short book imagining the world that lay ahead. Fewer than 100 pages long, Daedalus, or Science and the Future was an extraordinary whistle-stop tour of all the sciences, taking in everything from the future of human reproduction to energy generation.

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🟠 Des-fi 🔵 FS

How can we become better ancestors to our future generations? Human beings are cognitively not good at thinking about the long-term, without barriers of plausibility at present. That is why futurists help decision makers connect with the future emotionally to develop empathy in order to kick-start better decisions today, and also to stay ahead.

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🔵 FS 🟠 Des-fi

“Trying to anticipate the future is like driving on a winding road at night. You can see what’s in front of you, and things in the distance ultimately come into view as you move forward. But beyond that, you can’t know,” they say.

They worry this kind of thinking overlooks present-day problems and could even be used to justify harmful actions if they might benefit future generations.

To understand the best way to think about what comes next, Inverse contributor and tech journalist Becca Caddy spoke to philosopher and eschatologist Émile Torres about the future and the inspiration for their upcoming book, Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation, which is due out in July.

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🟠 Des-fi 🔵 FS

This conversation on Second-order design fiction is part of an ongoing collective research project by Fry and Perera on Technology, Cosmotechnics, Design and Resistance. In their conversation Fry and Perera explore the concept of second-order design fiction (SoDF) as an emergent means of addressing how design is understood and practiced in the context of the contemporary ecological crisis. They propose how SoDF can be considered a potential alternative to the ‘crisis of representation’ that contributes significantly to the complications related to finding ways out of unsustainable practices.

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