diverging utopias: designing conversations on futures and cities

DIVERGING UTOPIASdesigning conversations on futures and cities.

Serena Pollastri - Lancaster University

- 80% urban population

- 80% urban population

- climate change

- 80% urban population

- climate change

- unprecedented challenges.

- 80% urban population

- climate change

- unprecedented challenges.

- “Smart Cities”

Image: Foster+Partners, Masdar Development

“What would be ways to articulate collisions, instead

of avoiding them?”

http://blogs.lgru.net/collision/?page_id=2

VISUAL CONVERSATIONS ON URBAN FUTURES

_subjectivefutures.wordpress.com

_subjectivefutures.wordpress.com

visual reports

games

platforms

little magazines

self produced, self-published, independent magazines that the creators distribute by themselves (Duncombe, 1997).

independent architectural publications that responded to social, political, artistic changes of the period (Colomina, 2010)

_zines

_little magazines

_Utopie, Sociologie de l’urbain

_Utopie, Sociologie de l’urbain

_colonne critique

“the fact that the critical column reacted to the text or the drawing was good; it produced fights, overlaps, critiques, everything you can imagine”

(Jean Aubert, 2010)

_colonne critique

...in which players speculate on alternative urban futures. To play critically means “to create or occupy play environments and activities that represent one or more questions about aspects of human life” (Flanagan, 2009)

_critical play

_Buckminster FullerWorld Game

_alternate reality games:World without Oil

_collaborative gameSYMTACTICS!

visualisation as both a process and an artefact.

Use of visual language: a type of language that is able to describe data or ideas that are complex and/or have a non-linear structure.

Visualisations as “thinking and reasoning aid” (Cross 1999, 32).

_platforms

_imaginary guidelines

_imaginary guidelines

visualisation as both a process and an artefact.

Use of visual language: a type of language that is able to describe data or ideas that are complex and/or have a non-linear structure.

make ideas mobile, immutable, presentable, readable and combinable. (Latour 1998)

_visual reports

_Lancaster as a sharing city

making sharing visible and tangible

_Lancaster as a sharing city

_practical questions

_conclusions

_conclusions

- Reclaim the “vision”

_conclusions

- Reclaim the “vision”

- the world we designed designs us. We take the world we are born into to be the world itself (Fry, 2008 reading Bordieu)

_conclusions

- Reclaim the “vision”

- the world we designed designs us. We take the world we are born into to be the world itself (Fry, 2008 reading Bordieu)

- imaginary reconstruction of society (Levitas)

_conclusions

- Reclaim the “vision”

- the world we designed designs us. We take the world we are born into to be the world itself (Fry, 2008 reading Bordieu)

- imaginary reconstruction of society (Levitas)

- as part of scenario building “communicative artifacts produced to further the social conversation about what to do” (Manzini, 2015)

_conclusions- Reclaim the “vision”

- the world we designed designs us. We take the world we are born into to be the world itself (Fry, 2008 reading Bordieu)

- imaginary reconstruction of society (Levitas)

- as part of scenario building “communicative artifacts produced to further the social conversation about what to do” (Manzini, 2015)

- real > impossible > possible (Lefebvre)

THANK YOU.subjectivefutures.wordpress.com

Serena Pollastri - Lancaster Universitys.pollastri@lancaster.ac.uk

@sere_miru