Task 2

Award Specific Unit 4

Date: 2 February 2012

Workshop 2: Agents of Change – A Reaction to Rationalism

- Critical Design, Design as Author, Design Fiction, Futurescaping.

ʻSurveying the bounds of the believable and pressing against the perimeter of

the possibleʼ.

How designers challenge our assumptions and preconceptions about the role

that products and services play in everyday life.

Inform an enquiry with the design task below.

Extend this into your design practice and document your process. Ready for

assessment.

Deadline: Ongoing

Design Task:

Design a fictitious island

Part conversation, part design fiction and part manifesto.

This task will provide you with a critical framework in which to develop designs

for a new or alternative product & service, a categorisation for citizens, an

environment for living or an entirely new mode for advertisement and

branding.

Urban spaces will soon be saturated with both visible and hidden

technologies that gather, transmit, regulate and modify data and human

perception.

Urban experience is enhanced by media that increasingly enables

simultaneous existence in both the realm of the virtual and real.

By way of design fiction, explore where physical, virtual and fictional worlds

connect. Develop final design components into a set of documents for

circulation across a range of media.

Through designing fictitious Islands we are expressing our interest in

the processes and dynamics that shape the present moment: in the

tools and products we use, the things we experience, the ways we think

about ourselves, and the world in which we inhabit.

Referenced exhibitions:

Ideal City Invisible Cities

http://www.idealcity-invisiblecities.org/231/

Mega-structure Reloaded

http://www.megastructure-reloaded.org/superstudio/

Forms of Inquiry

http://formsofinquiry.com/

Referenced Design Agencies:

Superflux

http://www.superflux.in/

Videos:

City of Men – Slovaj Zizek

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbgrwNP_gYE

A day made of glass – Corning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38

Microsoft Visions of the Future Parody

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0USn7eufXps

Slovaj Zizek – The Awakening

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrfYiGWZ1s

Future of Mud

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vkxju6aoZw

Song of the Machine

http://vimeo.com/22616192

Extended reading:

Owens, Mark. ʻ Forms of Inquiryʼ 2007

http://projectprojects.com/forms-of-inquiry/?view=thumb

Lukic, Branko. ʻ NONOBJECTʼ 2011

Http://www.nonobject.com

Poyner, Rick. ʻ Critical Omissionsʼ

http://www.icograda.org/feature/current/articles1273.htm