City As A Spaceship
Wilson School of Design 6X 3V8 Richmond, BC, Canada

A CAAS type of design challenge https://mailchi.mp//design-in-space-life-on-earth-design-c

Case Study: Refugee Astronaut, Yinka Shonibare The astronaut as a repeated symbol in Yinka Shonibare’s work, can reverse our understanding of what movement and habitation mean in the 21st Century. By combining this notion with the refugee Shonibare’s work probes recent ideas of nationalism and belonging. His use of Dutch Wax fabrics are a comment on appropriation and the colonial past in South East Asia and Africa from a time when when dutch settlers mass-produced traditional... Indonesian batik and sold these materials in West Africa. The use of this material materially subverts the notion of space exploration as a white endeavour. Both material and the form of the astronaut are supposed to destabilise the colonising mentality of discovery and new settlements. The statue is supposed to be a warning for the continued state of the climate emergency and a question about the inability for endless growth necessary in capitalism to function in favour of saving the environment. Like Shonibare we use our work to probe how to live in these times of climate emergency, what it means for the mass movement of people to urban environments and how metaphors and lessons from space can be projected onto the places that are increasingly unfamiliar. We have also come to question more what it means to survive in times of forced migration, increasing individualisation and climate uncertainty. Survival in urbanity is a community priority and a way to make durable society (what Bruno Latour argues is a responsibility of designers). Survival is rarely disassociated from nature and survivalism typically references both knowledge and skills in how to co-exist with nature. Maldonado (1972) in Design, Nature and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology focused on the human environment, which he characterized as one of the many subsystems that compose the vast ecological system of nature. When we view ourselves, as Shonibare does, as a critical factor in the climate emergency and the impact this will have on how and where we have to live in the coming years we can further understand how to approach living in this time.

-ED: Collective Climate Reports and Climate Data Mark-Making Two weeks ago we hosted a workshop for @uroborosfestival and asked our participants to make their background image the weather that was local to them on that day. As part of the collaging of geographically separate climates participants wrote collective climate reports reflecting on factual weather reports from their locale and their own experience in the weather that day. These scripts were then performed and we ma...rk made on top of the imagery and text in response to the way those climates felt. Even though everyone was experiencing a distinct weather system, the pieced together scripts provoked the experience of multiple climatic reactions in one day. Our collective climate reports take into consideration weather in Bangalore, Aberdeen, Prague, Vancouver, Bowen Island, Stockholm, London and Munich. Imagery: Criterion of Choreography, Delsarte System of Expression; Clouds, John Constable Poems: Holly Pester from Jacket 2 and snack room by Charlotte Geater #space #caas #spaceship #cities #technology #environment #society #closedloop #extraterrestrial #systemsthinking #design #citizenscience #climate #anticipation #storytelling #data #cloud #satellite #spacesuit #architecture #communication #sensing #wearables #remote #sf #weather #anticipation #architecture #body #collage #citizendesign #collective

Recommended Reading 4: Dispatch from the Future: Science Fictioning (in) the Anthropocene by Jessie Beier Against the backdrop of our current locations (Bangalore, North East Scotland, Vienna and Bowen Island) we have transposed text from Jessie Beier. Beier writes about the truthiness of the science and news that we intake. The frames that situate the climate science we consume are confined by a particular set of circumstances. Beier scrolls through her phone, each time co...ming across another story of opportunity, progress and hope. Often, political imaginaries will speak of the collective hope we should have for our future without investing in the technologies or systems that would help society to reach this better‘ idea of a climate future. We have been led to believe we are the exceptional species which has led to the lack of effort put into the designing-with other species. As an argument towards a new approach to our realist impulses she writes: While everybody is sure that change is right around the corner, that our human power and ingenuity will steer us the right way, while everybody is waiting and seeing, assured that time is on our side, while we refresh our newsfeeds, again and again and again, hope is exposed for what it really is: Not a motor for change, but a brake. Beyond hoping for some day when the skies will finally part, when realism is exposed as yet another ambit of human philosophical privilege, when we realize that perhaps the Earth is not ours to save, we must produce modes of thinking and acting that are capable of short-circuiting the ‘here and now’ in order to play out the scene differently. The argument for science-fictioning is like Haraway’s arguments for storytelling. We live in a fiction that has the ability to change if we understand and work in it as always fictional. #space #caas #spaceship #cities #technology #environment #society #closedloop #extraterrestrial #systemsthinking #design #citizenscience #climate #anticipation #storytelling #data #cloud #satellite #spacesuit #architecture #communication #sensing #wearables #remote #affect #sf #haraway #anticipation #architecture #body

-ED: Uroboros Festival On the 14th of May we will be running a workshop on collaging climate wearables for @uroborosfestival. The UROBOROS online festival explores what and how we can design in these troubling times to support positive change.... In these complex and complicated times, it is difficult to feel that we have any agency to nurture positive change and design anything good. Such skepticism is further reinforced by the many failures of ‘innovative’ design projects and agendas: from techno-utopian narratives of better futures exhausted by techno-solutionism to the commercial appropriation of critical and speculative design mindsets. While acknowledging such critiques, we can’t afford to accept that ‘designing for better worlds’ is futile and impossible. In the times of looping crises, we can’t fall into the trap of passive skepticism and lethargy. While acknowledging such critiques, we can’t afford to accept that ‘designing for better worlds’ is futile and impossible. In the times of looping crises, we can’t fall into the trap of passive skepticism and lethargy. On the 14th of May from 19.30-21.00 CET we will run our workshop we will ask When considering a climate sensing environment that is connected to the individual and the community we ask how what we wear can and does serve as that intermediary? We propose the possibility of understanding the body in relation to urban spaces and locally collected data streams through sensing wearables. In this workshop, you are asked to create a WEARABLE that shows others how you sense the world and how you’d share information about urban realities in real time. This workshop will be a series of exercises in making/collaging/assembling ideas surrounding PROTECTION and CARE, ANTICIPATION, RISK, SURVIVAL and COMMUNICATION with what you have available in your home and on your laptop. During the workshop, we will discuss different types of wearables, their ethics and the possibilities for these soft sensing systems. These will become a series of visual and material considerations of local environments that depict how this data would flow and sense and be inhabited by the body.