International Summer University “Relate” 2021/22
It is the narrative of the objects, that is, what the objects tell, that should help to interpret the global socio-cultural options of humanity’s survival. Objects as narrative tools of perception and cognition can possibly contribute more intensively to the metamorphosis of persistent, habitual world views and perspectives – including the human-nature metabolism and including the human-nature divide – than the purely rational empires of the sciences. And it is With all controversy – it is about a “grand narrative”.
In this project, design fiction becomes the methodological basis for artistic research based on scientific knowledge about phenomena of the Anthropocene.
By objects is meant the whole range of real experiential experiences, i.e. objects, films, performances and others. And: objects with their narrative fundus are culturally, i.e. regionally defined. Only in this way can we narrate in an understandable way.
The task of the project is to design and produce fictional objects with narratives that, when they come together, open up a narrative world. Our experiment consists of combining narrative object representations by visual artists with theatrical narrative forms developed by Boal/Freire and Schlingensief/Brasch, among others.
The preliminary work for the design processes consists of working out scientifically validated scenarios about possible metamorphoses – or effects of ecological and social tipping points. The fiction afterwards or the fiction of the process of upheaval is the subject of narratives. And in these, there are objects that are to be created and which are then carriers of the narratives. The narratives concern the socio-cultural levels of action of the Anthropocene.
Method
- Create objects that resemble materialised thought experiments. Designing artefacts of possible futures and their socio-cultural context as well as the possible manipulations of the artefacts. This blurs the contrasts between science, scientific fact and design fiction.
- Production process of a fiction that deals with desirable and alternative futures.
- Design fiction is a method of critical and reflexive foresight that is intended to lead to perceptual changes in everyday life and worldview. In our case, it is meant to help narrate and imagine / vividly realise processes of metamorphosis/upheaval and states of survival in the advanced Anthropocene, especially the central features of futures, and to constantly revise them in a process.
“Objects” (functioning prototypes) play the core of material representations of possible futures.
There is the extreme challenge of perceiving substantial deconstructions of the real world (functioning, preconditions, inherent reproduction and plausibility) with the crash/epochal change, AS WELL AS being able to imagine the central characteristics and basic features of the new culture and to represent them.
Design Fictions is therefore also widely oriented towards design-oriented futures, whereby the style of presentation – the visual representation in the form of images, films… – is crucial. Images and videos can effectively convey a message in a very short time, whereas a text or a displayed object takes much longer. It is also easier to provoke by means of pictorial and visual representations, as the design of the artefacts already dictates an expression and a use.
In the summer university we will work transcollectively and transdisciplinarily. In the congruence of fiction and rapidly and radically changing reality, design fiction can be used by scholars promoting the development of futures. As well as by designers sketching futures, artists sketching visions for futures, architects designing speculative and visionary buildings, and so on. It provokes creative ideas for an iterative entry of possible futures. (by teasing the imagination through the deliberate use of haptic objects). The objects are deliberately created as artefacts or visualisations of a future and are embedded in a narrative that has its origins in the socio-cultural technologies or systems of the present. This evoked reflection on the present calls for thinking in futures.
With design fiction, a vocabulary or symbols can be created by means of a fiction, with the help of which experts and interested laypeople can exchange ideas about use cases and possible expectations. This adds another level of development to the emerging technology that traditional and scientific methods could not generate.
“The productive blending of scientific fact, art and science fiction is perhaps the only way for science to grow beyond itself and achieve more than incremental forms of innovation.” It can lead to new questions that could not yet be asked in the present…: The aim is to implement the “What if…” question and to create a new perspective on development, which can be immediately incorporated into a feedback process to development. Science fiction prototyping thus allows to test use cases of an idea in a narrative and its context.