Finding Futures
Finding Futures is about raising future artifacts, places and imaginations through attentive touring and collective learning. It is an invitation to wander around, to notice differently. To trade your data collection instincts for a more naïve scavenger-hunt playfulness in order to glimpse futures in the making.
The urban landscape is teeming with intensive technological systems and inextricable “forms of life” (Winner 2004) that enable, dictate and modulate our everyday experiences. As we move about our day, flicking switches and taps to be bathed in light and treated with water we experience momentous technological achievements that operate behind the scenes, often out of sight and out of mind. At the same time, mundane technologies – walking shoes, street sweepers, sunscreen, street signs and mobile GPS— facilitate our urban experiences in particular ways. Finding Futures tours ask you to notice the momentous and mundane technologies that underpin the city.
These tours, which seek to attune participants to new ways of seeing the city and to use these gazes to enable reflection on technological futures, consist firstly of a loosely guided walking tour around a segment of an urban environment (in the first tour, Lisbon, Portugal, and in the second, Tempe, Arizona). Within this first stage participants were asked to be attentive to, in the words of the guide provided to them, “what these pasts might become … Spot signs of the times … [Identify] the future breaking through”, and to take digital photographs (on smartphones or cameras) capturing these moments. Participants were thus asked to look at the city with an eye to its temporal dimensions as well as to the ways in which it is structured – perhaps invisibly – by technological systems. In a second stage, after the tour ended, participants were asked to annotate the photographs they have taken – with a tag that identifies the relevant tour (‘lisboafindingfutures’ or ‘tempefindingfutures’) and a caption which explicates the significance of the image – and to upload them to the photo-sharing website Flickr. From here, they can readily be pulled together into a ‘Finding Futures’ group which enables their viewing as a composite entity. Specifically, we used a customised version of the JQuery plugin ‘Supersized’ to pull participants’ photos from Flickr and display them in a slideshow that simultaneously rolled each image’s caption across the bottom of the screen.
The third stage, involving display, consolidation, and discussion of the images and experiences each tour had resulted in, differed between the two tours. In Lisbon, the images were viewed within an installation environment and participants asked to reflect upon the contrasts and themes they presented. In Tempe a more structured environment was used, with a workshop format enabling a number of different activities (including the development of timelines and sketches of the worlds they suggested) around the images. In both cases the viewing of the images, collected by different people at different points within the walking tour, in a collective environment enabled shared reflections on the trajectories that technologies within a particular city were and should be taking.
Finding Futures is a precursor to the NSF funded 'Futurescape City Tours' led by the Center for Nanotechnology in Society.
See more here>
The urban landscape is teeming with intensive technological systems and inextricable “forms of life” (Winner 2004) that enable, dictate and modulate our everyday experiences. As we move about our day, flicking switches and taps to be bathed in light and treated with water we experience momentous technological achievements that operate behind the scenes, often out of sight and out of mind. At the same time, mundane technologies – walking shoes, street sweepers, sunscreen, street signs and mobile GPS— facilitate our urban experiences in particular ways. Finding Futures tours ask you to notice the momentous and mundane technologies that underpin the city.
These tours, which seek to attune participants to new ways of seeing the city and to use these gazes to enable reflection on technological futures, consist firstly of a loosely guided walking tour around a segment of an urban environment (in the first tour, Lisbon, Portugal, and in the second, Tempe, Arizona). Within this first stage participants were asked to be attentive to, in the words of the guide provided to them, “what these pasts might become … Spot signs of the times … [Identify] the future breaking through”, and to take digital photographs (on smartphones or cameras) capturing these moments. Participants were thus asked to look at the city with an eye to its temporal dimensions as well as to the ways in which it is structured – perhaps invisibly – by technological systems. In a second stage, after the tour ended, participants were asked to annotate the photographs they have taken – with a tag that identifies the relevant tour (‘lisboafindingfutures’ or ‘tempefindingfutures’) and a caption which explicates the significance of the image – and to upload them to the photo-sharing website Flickr. From here, they can readily be pulled together into a ‘Finding Futures’ group which enables their viewing as a composite entity. Specifically, we used a customised version of the JQuery plugin ‘Supersized’ to pull participants’ photos from Flickr and display them in a slideshow that simultaneously rolled each image’s caption across the bottom of the screen.
The third stage, involving display, consolidation, and discussion of the images and experiences each tour had resulted in, differed between the two tours. In Lisbon, the images were viewed within an installation environment and participants asked to reflect upon the contrasts and themes they presented. In Tempe a more structured environment was used, with a workshop format enabling a number of different activities (including the development of timelines and sketches of the worlds they suggested) around the images. In both cases the viewing of the images, collected by different people at different points within the walking tour, in a collective environment enabled shared reflections on the trajectories that technologies within a particular city were and should be taking.
Finding Futures is a precursor to the NSF funded 'Futurescape City Tours' led by the Center for Nanotechnology in Society.
See more here>