Artefact 233
A Postcard from Barcelona
A Postcard from Barcelona
I'm sitting in the stillness of the penultimate day of the Innovation and Future Thinking course here at IED Barcelona. My work, beyond supporting students as they create their final projects, is all but done.
I'm still not quite sure I believe the course has been happening, given, you know, everything. So perhaps I'm documenting this as a reality check for myself, more than anything else. Let's just say it's a postcard, from me to you. With more images, and less about the weather. A fast, informal collection of what's happened these past two weeks.
It's the first year I've taught since working on the seeing information as light, not liquid thesis. It's really given a new emphasis to this first week. Making people consider all the information they'll gather as individual particles and pixels that add up to many, many different possible pictures has given the way we capture and share things new purpose and emphasis.
Leaning into a metaphor as a group is really interesting; though I wonder if I now want to make people more conscious of the language and metaphor around information as they go through they week. An idea for next year, perhaps.
But it's driven by things like this; one of my favourite quotes from the week was one student was just talking about her experience walking through the city, and remarked "I'm really feeling my new eyes..."
We drew attention it it a little at the time, but these moments are something I want to make more of in future.
The first week is basically research week; after a tour through what I refer to as the metamechanics of information (Movement, Maps, Layers, Loops), Scott Smith took the group through a day of Sensing and Scanning, Christina Bifano led an expedition through museums and exhibitions (like a mini, futures-focussed Ways of Seeing), and Elisabet Roselló led us through what it would mean to set up participatory futures here. Futures designed with people, not for them... or at them.
Making the students aware through this first week of how we see the present, and how the active scanning process in their heads is unfolding in the moment, has implications for how we look to the future too.
I brought with me a new set of the Office Of Object Identification (OOOi) frames, which Natalie and I devised between us a few years back on the course.
It's a frame to unpick... well, anything. It works to focus the eye and let the mind wander through what that means for the assemblage behind. A field tool for pulling apart systems.
We gave them out on the first day, and all through our week the students were catching those particles of light as a result.
That first week was set up to lead to the structure of Assemblage Space, an early version of which can be found here. However, the version I present during the course (and the week before) was a much sharper, keener articulation, drawing attention to particular facets that keep us mindful of where information really comes from, and what to do to broaden ourselves in 'the narrow now' of our own experiences.
The point of ending the first week like this was to make it as clear as possible to the students that there's little value in just staring out into the future and paint pretty pictures. We're trying to make better decisions in the present, by imagining specific scenarios we can use as research prompts to better navigate the world we live in now.
To that end, a series of practitioners (Fabien Girardin of the Near Future Laboratory, Natalie Kane of The V&A, Tobias Revell of Arup, and Toban Shadlyn of RISD's Centre for Complexity) came and described how their futures work is applied.
And as we sit here in the quiet of a Barcelona evening, students burrowing into their pile of deliverables, continually coming back to why they would do this, I feel like it's the most specific the course has been yet on the importance of the ends of this type of work, not just the enjoyment of the means.
Part of me feels like too harsh a taskmaster for landing this on the group who came to Barcelona in the summer to enjoy a light light futures course. The city is calling, especially at this hour, yet their dedication is to be admired.
Maybe it's because this week is specifically, uncommonly hot. This will be the coldest summer of the rest of your life has been a meme repeated to me more than once in the last week. Working on the world, applying yourself to problems, seems more vital than ever.
Maybe it's because they've looked the the old tools and approaches, the standard way of operating, the testaments passed from leader to leader across their organisations for decades... and realised they all still led us here.
The future is unwritten. But the usual suspects still seem to be holding the pen.
I think I want to use the basic framework we've created here in Barcelona in more ways, to help others make a difference to a world they see the evident problems in. But first, I want to help these folks burnish their visions for a better tomorrow, but more crucially sharpen the image they have for a better today.
John
Want to see more? Have a flick through the photo diary of the course...