Responsive Mobile Environments

A reflection on the invisible and otherworldly qualities in everyday technologies

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Investigation 3 - Warmup Exercise

Investigation 3 - Warmup Exercise

tl;dr: Working as a group, draw up a short speculative proposal for this project in the form of a ghost story. Try to imagine an encounter with your proposed object and the world around it. To do this, we’ll imagine the folklore, fables, myths and ghost stories that might be told about your haunted devices. Use this to thing through and communicate the unexpected, uncomfortable, unsettling or strange experience you are hoping to create. Complete this in no more than 2 hours. Complete this exercise in under 2 hours.

Precedent and Context

Everything is Someone Cover. Credit Joshua Noble and Simone Rebaudengo

Everything is Someone: Future Fables about People and Technology and Everything in between by Joshua Noble and Simone Rebaudengo

[A] book about objects, technology, humans, and everything in-between. It is composed of seven “future fables” for children and adults, which move from the present into a future in which “being” and “thinking” are activities not only for humans. Absorbing and thought-provoking, this collection explores the point where technology and philosophy meet, seen through the eyes of kids, vacuum cleaners, factories and mountains. From a man that wants to become a table, to the first vacuum cleaner that bought another vacuum cleaner, all the way to a mountain that became the president of a nation, each story brings the reader into a different perspective, extrapolating how some of the technologies we are developing today, will bur the line between, us, devices, and natural beings too. In Everything is Someone the authors translate their experience in working with futures studies, technology, and design in the form of a mix media experience.

Brief

Within this creative experiment, you’ll try to imagine an encounter with your proposed object and the world around it. To do this, we’ll imagine the folklore, fables, myths and ghost stories that might be told about your devices.

We’ll take cues from ‘Everything is Someone’ and begin this exploration in class.

The brief is as follows:

Write a short ghost story (<300 words) told from the perspective of a haunted device.

Use this to thing through and communicate unsettling or uncomfortable experiences you hope to evoke through this project.

Sketch this possible approach to your creative project, in under 2 hours.

Learning Objectives

As part of this exercise you will be asked to:

  • Creatively explore the possibilities for your project to get early feedback
  • Experiment with creative forms for imagining and building worlds
  • Gain hands on experience with methods for rendering speculative proposals and concepts
  • Rapidly prototype everyday scenarios through creative fiction
  • Explore the kinds of dialog and unexpected experiences you could create through this project
  • Practice telling stories and imagining experiences around smart and connected objects

Deliverables

You are asked to deliver a short short (at least 300 words)

Share your outcomes as a post on the #projects channel of on Slack.

Prepare to read your short story in class as an introduction to your project.

Resources