week 8. design poem

Science Poem Manifesto by OK DO
Design notes on a lonely drone (6 poems 翻譯與朗讀)

Science fact -> science fiction -> science poem
Design fact -> design fiction -> design poem

scientist, engineer, designer (artist) ?


Feature film: Prometheus


http://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/prometheus-overview/

Science fiction or religious fiction?


EX 4: Design Poems (Science Poems) project

1. Choose a science (or design) fact (artifacts).
2. Use the artifacts as material of Poems.
3. You can change the color, painting, material, ...... to composite a setting.
4. You may add poem or Heiku to your work. (or poems by the artifacts)
5. Take lots of photographs and upload to the Google drive.



Deadlines:Nov. 14, 2018

week 7. aesthetics of speculation

1. design fiction slides by Bleecker:

Pecha kucha v2_rotterdam_2011 from bleeckerj




2. Practice "Poetics of design fictions" design process

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics


Questions:
What is "speculation"? What is speculative design? What is aesthetics of speculation?

naive realism 素樸實在論.  modal realism (MR) 模態實在論, possiblist realism 可能主義實在論， speculative realism (SR) 推測實在論

pragmatist aesthetics 實用主義美學 (Dewey), speculative aesthetics 推測美學

EX 3:

speculative aesthetics around the life world:

請觀察生活周遭, 拍照片表達奇異的推測美感(aesthetics of speculation)、技術詩意(techno-poetic)、類平行世界、almost impossible reality。

  

  參考: Lynne Cohen, Lucinda Devlin, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan

Lars Tunbjörk’s Alien at the Office　(2004)　  (mundane spaces that seem extraordinary. Yet these alien spaces are where many people spend their working lives)

Lucinda Devlin's photos:

http://www.lucindadevlin.com/

Lynne Cohen's artworks:

http://www.lynne-cohen.com/
Lynne Cohen’s Occupied Territory (1987)


Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Modern and Unfamiliar9 (2007)

Richard Ross’s Architecture of Authority10 (2007)


(The above three examples reveal spaces that we know must exist but have no idea how they look. They have a harsh, inhuman quality, stripped down to the absolute essentials, emphasizing their purpose.

Lucinda Devlin’s The Omega Suites (1991–1998)  provides glimpses into extreme
but ghoulish spaces—execution chambers, the places where the state, on its
citizens’ behalf, takes people’s lives. They are clinical, easy-to-maintain,
brutally engineered environments designed to achieve one purpose—the
humane killing of human beings. They include safety measures, provision for
last-minute retrieval, and the need for the event to be witnessed.

Larry Sultan's Untitled Evidence:

http://larrysultan.com/gallery/evidence/ : gathered images from the archives of research centers,
laboratories, test sites, and industrial facilities, presented without captions
or other information. They compel us to interpret what is going on, to project
stories and meanings onto them, illustrating that even objective records are
rarely neutral.

For us, these are the proto-images for an aesthetics of speculation. They
suggest a techno-poetic landscape situated somewhere between what we are

and what we have the potential to become.

Deadline: 2018/11/7

印出兩張與同學交換。

Questions:
What are the possible qualities of speculative aesthetics?  for example:
out-of-place,
out-of-time,
multiple possible worlds,
hidden truth,
object's viewpoint,
other unknown actor's viewpoint,
other species viewpoints
withdrawal,
resistance,
object's enjoyment (allure, emotion),
non-human (machine, AI)'s perspective,
strange object-to-object relationship,
...
Constructively identify at least 20 qualities by concluding classmates' sharing.


Reading:
Speculative aesthetics

Speculative Aesthetics and Object-Oriented Inquiry (OOI),” by N. Katherine Hayles 

 Graham Harman: “Aesthetics as First Philosophy"
 p. 159:

The essential move here is to identify aesthetics with “enjoyment” (Levinas’s term) or “allure” (Harman’s) so that the sensual qualities of objects in which other objects “bathe” is understood as an essentially aesthetic response. Thus aesthetics is generalised so that it applies not only to humans but to all objects, including inanimate ones.

p. 167:

Following Harman, Bogost accepts that “all objects recede interminably (沒完沒了的) into themselves,” which implies that putting things “at the center of a new metaphysics also requires us to admit that they do not exist just for us.”

p. 168:

"we never understand the alien experience, we only ever reach for it metaphorically.”

p. 169:

"Where I begin to depart from Bogost and Harman is on the issue of how objects manifest themselves. Whereas they emphasise an object’s allure, the attraction it emanates for other objects, more important in my experience is the resistance objects offer to human manipulation and understanding"

"The difference between resistance and acquiescence is that acquiescence is always metaphoric, whereas resistance is decisive: “Whatever I am, I’m not that,” an object can respond to human probing."

 p. 178.

"I ended by arguing that the way to escape anthropocentrism is precisely through an imaginative projection into the worldviews of other objects and beings, based on evidence about their ways of being in the world,"

week 6. seven types of thought experiments

1. Students present Time framework for sci-fi movies.
2. Thought experiment

"One way this might be possible is to treat design speculations not as
narratives or coherent “worlds” but as thought experiments—constructions,
crafted from ideas expressed through design—that help us think about
difficult issues." p. 80. SE

"Thought experiments are usually done in fields
where it is possible to precisely define limits and rules, such as mathematics,
science (particularly physics), and philosophy (especially ethics) to test
ideas, refute theories, challenge limits, or explore possible implications.
They make full use of the imagination and are often beautiful designs in
themselves."

"One of our favorite forms of thought experiment uses reductio ad absurdum,
a type of logical argument in which one assumes a claim for the sake of
argument and derives an absurd or ridiculous outcome by taking it to its
extreme, concluding that the original claim must have been wrong because it
led to such an absurd result."

"Another well-established form of thought experiment is the counterfactual. A
historical fact is changed to see what might have happened, if. . . . It is
sometimes used in history to understand the importance of key events and
their influence on how the world turned out."


"...we are
more interested in using props to transport viewers’ imagination into a
thought experiment, or what-if, and allow enough room for them to make
their own interpretations." p. 93, SE


Generally speaking, there are seven types of thought experiments in which one reasons from causes to effects, or effects to causes. (wikipedia)

(1) 

Prefactual

Prefactual (before the fact) thought experiments — — speculate on possible future outcomes, given the present, and ask "What will be the outcome if event E occurs?"

 (2)

Counterfactual

Counterfactual (contrary to established fact) thought experiments —  — speculate on the possible outcomes of a different past; and ask "What might have happened if A had happened instead of B?" 

(3)

Semifactual

Semifactual thought experiments — — speculate on the extent to which things might have remained the same, despite there being a different past; and asks the question Even though X happened instead of E, would Y have still occurred? 

(4)

Prediction

The activity of prediction attempts to project the circumstances of the present into the future.

(5)

Hindcasting

The activity of hindcasting involves running a forecast model after an event has happened in order to test whether the model's simulation is valid.

(6)

Retrodiction

The activity of retrodiction (or postdiction) involves moving backwards in time, step-by-step, in as many stages as are considered necessary, from the present into the speculated past to establish the ultimate cause of a specific event (e.g., reverse engineeringand forensics).

(7)

Backcasting

he activity of backcasting —involves establishing the description of a very definite and very specific future situation. It then involves an imaginary moving backwards in time, step-by-step, in as many stages as are considered necessary, from the future to the present to reveal the mechanism through which that particular specified future could be attained from the present.

See Blade runner 2049 ->2048 nowhere to run -> 2036 Nexus Dawn -> Blackout 2022

Bladerunner (1982) 2019

week 4. narratives in Einstein's Dreams

1. student presentation
2. what is "narrative" in science ficiton?
3. What is "counterfactual narratives" ?

Markussen & Knutz (2013) Design fiction 時間架構圖：

EX2:
1. 選擇一個電影，具有特殊的時間空間敘事架構 (例如，你的名字、明天的我要和昨天的你約會、觸不到的戀人、江之島三稜鏡、現在很想見你、回到未來、....)
2. 依照上圖的原則，畫出敘事架構圖。(世界，多重世界，自我，敘事者，自我複本，年代，時間幾何...)
Deardline 10/17/2018 上課分享
上傳到Google drive (公布於 FB 課程社團)

參考：
Thomas Markussen and Eva Knutz. 2013. The poetics of design fiction. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces (DPPI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 231-240.