SEMINAR SUMMARY #2 — ENDGAME: SPECULATIVE DIAGRAMS ABOUT SPECULATIVE FICTION

**half-baked seminar summary from pre-isolation Week 2. Had this as a draft for days, though I would just post as is to get it out of the way and move on. 

THOUGHTS
- really interesting seeing the progression of a project, both the design and research agenda and how they did inform each other and push it forward/ into different directions
- I keep thinking about fiction and the possibilities latent/present in words and language... the Maddaddam project was an example of how design + fiction can bring about interesting conversations together --> a greater lenses of environmental and biotechnological futures

- Also similarly, I have never really tackled diagrammatic layouts and 'information design', but starting to unpack the conventions of this type of design, and how it is constructed, it's something I'll keep thinking about.  
- The really structured formal processes of thinking through, and the recording of, your own work, and hearing Zoe talk through it, and even writing these seminar summaries and experiment logs, is helping me understand the kind of practice that I am building towards. Critical practice is rigorous, and my process has never really been consciously structured in a way that actually feeds my own ability to reflect, and engage in 'criticality'. And in this strange in-between of classes, i'm itching to consolidate some of these ideas and generate my own experiments. 

I found the ideas presented here around Johanna Drucker's Graphesis (2011) very insightful, and having read part of it now for Friday's Theorisation class, I do better understand how 'thinking through making', and playing with the subversion of meaning, offered a certain kind of insight into Drucker's argument.

SEMINAR SUMMARY 9/3/2020 #1

DESIGN AS RESEARCH

A theoretical framework to formalise making as research. This places structures around making and playing in design (e.g. keeping logs of your experimentation, drawing conclusions, etc.) so that we are more equipped to be critical of our own practice. This 'criticality' (Mazé, 2009) and its reflective approach drives our own work and potentially the broader design discipline.

SPECULATIVE HISTORIES

Asking 'What If' questions, reimagining 'what was' or 'is' to interrogate the world we know and perhaps accept as a given. Examining the 'Other' through history and time to better understand the structures and institutions that have built and maintained the status quo. Design, and speculative histories, are spaces to give visibility to those who aren't deemed as equal, through their race, gender, sexuality, able-bodiedness, etc. Through our making, we can make space for the purpose of decentring Eurocentric/colonial narratives and voices. Sentance (2019) talks about this in the colonial Australian context where official archives are institutional agents, that both record and erase history. 

POSTHUMAN PERSPECTIVES

Posthuman perspectives looks at our relationship, as humans and designers, with the natural and technological world around us. This is contextualised in our present and future state where technology is a defining aspect of our world, and we as a race, have ushered in the Anthropocene. This research space seems really rich in its invitation to make sense of, and make meaning from this era where many established, traditional values and structures are disintegrating. Laura Forlano (2017) writes on the blurring of binaries: human and nonhuman, culture and nature, human and animal. If these basic distinctions are bleeding into each other, how are we to define ourselves?

There seems to also be an opportunity here to bring in different perspectives and validate people and experiences which have never wholly belonged to either binary. The decentring of the human makes space for animals, the natural environment, machines, but also those who are viewed as "less-than-human", and are subject to unequal rights and treatment.  

Forlano, L. (2017). Posthumanism and Design. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 3(1), 16–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001

Mazé, R. (2009). Critical of What? / Kritiska mot vad?, in M. Ericson, et al. (eds) Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice – The reader. Sternberg Press / Iaspis, Berlin.

Sentance, N. (2019, September 18). Disrupting the Colonial Archive, Sydney Review of Books. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/natalie-harkin-archival-poetics/