Reimagining the Now
Tool design and implementation by Gillian Russell, Craig Badke, and Garnet Hertz
ReImagining the Now is a 3-part speculative tool that challenges participants to collaboratively rethink existing technologies through a wide spectrum of world views.
Technological artifacts embody and reflect valuing systems that are deeply embedded within our culture, values that are often unseen or unacknowledged. Whether we are conscious of it or not, these artifacts provide material answers to questions of how to live and act in the world. This workshop introduces a series of core techniques and ideas from responsible speculation to think through digital technology’s capacities and potentiality both as a corrective to its uncritical embrace and as a way to redefine the digital in daily life.
The ambitions of the project are twofold: i) To question and deconstruct latent assumptions around specific everyday technologies, highlighting the need for more transparency to these complex systems, and ii) To test out tactics and strategies of dismantling and reassembling digital infrastructures around different value positions, questioning what knowledges and imaginaries are necessary to enable divergence, transformation and change.
To do this we devised a custom card set and large paper playmat that guides participants through processes of mapping, valueing and rethinking our technologies through different value systems as a means to offer new ways of thinking the world we inhabit, and the possibilities for its future.
Check out the free, downloadable print-and-play edition – coming soon
