I spoke at the #UALPlatform on Networked Making last week. It was a really nice event and I got to meet some new people and catch up with some folks I've known a little while. I spoke about the models of the world that the university and the subject have and how they interact awkwardly and maybe poorly respond to each other sometimes. I made a short video to sum up the hypothesis which people enjoyed.
The slides from my talk and some of the others are up here and you can check those out.The blog of my talk from the Design Futures meetup is still doing the rounds which is cool. It seems to have struck a resonance with people which makes me feel like it was a worthwhile thing to do so I'll try and keep writing up talks even though I have less and less to do with speculative design. Despite that less and lessness I did an interview with old friends at speculative.edu following on from the talk. It's a tricky tihng to talk about because I don't really have strong feelings about speculative design either way, I just find it concerning how strong other people's feelings are about it. I guess that's why I don't come across as particularly serious. Some quotes:
there’s the reasonable critique that the canon of Speculative Design ends up in galleries or on post-it notes. That seems pretty accurate. I would struggle to come up with more than a dozen speculative projects that weren’t either laundering corporate irresponsibility through the medium of post-it notes or inaccessible gallery work.
As for reclaiming it … I don’t know, why bother? It broadened the capabilities of design, it brought new relationships and tools and perhaps that’s enough. There are so many other interesting emerging practices out there that deserve attention. You wouldn’t remake Fawlty Towers, would you?I've been getting more and more chat correspondence from folks via email and I think that's really cool. Please send me emails of things you're into or just about random little project, it's nice.
Learnings
On Saturday/Sunday I did the Dunwich Dynamo, riding 120 miles overnight form London to the Suffolk coast. I put the whole thing up on Strava and Instagram where most of my bike content is. I documented some of mine and my riding buddy's learnings of that specific process so you can check them out there.
This week I also learned:
- Quite a lot about 'change management' from a training session I did on Monday, the Kubler Ross model is what people sometimes call the 'seven stages of...' thing. Not sure whether these models reduce complex phenomena or whether phenomena emerge from them. I've totally stopped being skeptical about these types of training things now, I almost always find them super useful and revealing. It's kind of cool to be standoffish about them but they're good opportunities for doing better.
- Learnt quite a lot about connectivism from the #UALPlatform including a new physical activity for actually drawing strings together like a giant investigative wall chart.
- I don't know if this was new or whether I had forgotten it but cats' meows and purrs are noises they've evolved specifically for humans. They don't miaow or purr at other cats.