Envisioning Habitats (W.I.P)
Context
Thesis at Parsons MFA Transdisciplinary Design Program.
2022
Approach
Designing research methodologies,
Participatory Research,
Digital Storytelling
Overview
How might we create the space for disentangling ourselves with a deeply colonial world, reconcile our relationship with the land, and imagining a more equitable and reciprocal future paradigm with the pluriverse?
Tool Used
Figma
Logic Pro X
Touch Designer
New Art City* (In future)
In a deeply capitalist, white supremacist, and patriarchal world, how might we frame for a habitat where better futures emerge, instead of depicting future landscapes that leaves little room for emergence?
Habitat VS Landscape: When it comes to landscapes, we often think of their aesthetic appeals and pictorial representations. In a colonial setting, natural landscapes have been reconstructed according to human needs over and over. The landscape is objectified by human, and human have power over it. But a habitat should not be a human’s object. It is a breeding ground for emergence of multiple lives and deeply interconnected relationships. It holds the power of unknown complexity over human. When we are imagining alternative worlds, we need to see them as habitats, the conditions for new possibilities, instead of landscapes with little room for changes.
But before framing for the future conditions, we need to learn and unlearn about the past. The past is layered with multiple contexts, ideas, positionalities, events, figures, terrains, ownership, etc. Understanding the histories of a place often gives us a clue of how things come into existence/erasure, and what bigger ideas or isms opened up spaces for their transformations.
And to avoid perpetuating the displacements, exclusions, erasure, appropriations of the pluralities from the past into the future, we need to examine the existing power structures, unlearn the white-supremacist and patriarchal mindsets, and give birth to abolitionary, queer, inclusive, and equitable visions to challenge and even subvert the old ones. By subversion, we are not looking at flipping things upside down, but removing the need for the dominant power to exist and to envision the possibilities for a pluriverse where co-existence subverts colonization, queerness subverts homogeneity, equity subverts racism and classism.
Imagine in the next decade, plants can replace the "cloud" as a cleaner data storage medium.
And that leaves us to the questions: If your data lives in the plants around you, would you feel the urge to take care of their lives? Would you still treat them as plants, the living creatures who are generous enough to spare their capacity to humans, or machines that would be disposed of once failure occurs? Is such human-centric approach really fair to nature?
Screenshots
Cone t
My Positionality
Speculative future design is the futuring methods I learned about and used the most throughout my life as a designer.
I am interested in building future worlds with participatory tools that
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disentangle designers with the privileges, the partial perspectives and situated knowledge they have through participatory approaches
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allow people who know nothing about futuring to practice the approach
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open up a space for that welcome different ideas, stories, experiences, and visions.
In order to
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show people outside of the design field their power to combat biases and mainstream perspectives in future design process
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inform designers how they can approach visions of more equitable designs with participatory research
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gather a collective narrative of a more equitable future to challenge the dominant paradigm in the world
