Stockholm Speculative Futures Meetup — Building Future Worlds for Science Fiction
“Although Utopia and Dystopia are faraway, extreme concepts, they both exist around us now, distributed through geography, income and opportunity etc.”
-Viraj Joshi
For our third event of the Speculative Futures Stockholm chapter, on 16th June 2020, we went virtually!
Like many other events across the world, the unprecedented coronavirus stopped us from hosting a physical event where we all could meet face-to-face, but it didn’t stop us from meeting up online.
Before summer we invited Viraj Joshi, designer and technologist at Fjord, to present and share his view on why we should use Science Fiction and future casting in our design process. During the event, Viraj took us deeper into the different values of using future-casting for provocation, expression, or for a strategy purpose. Viraj screened his short film “The Doohickey” as an example of how these methodologies can be applied.
One of the highlights of the evening was the interactive world-building session where we invited the audience to try a fun and collaborative way of producing Sci-fi stories. Keep reading for more about the event and to view the outcome of the world-building session.
When asked why we should think about the future, Viraj says…
“Strategic futurescaping activities gauge signals that are happening in smaller scope around the world, but have a potential to blow up and affect the larger status quo of society. Science Fiction and Speculative Design provide a fertile ground for testing of ideas, products, services, and people’s interactions with them, in a narrative-driven setting. By thinking of how things might be, we can get a better sense of how things should be. Future-Casting exercises can help us chart tangible steps to our preferred future.”
“The Doohickey”
“The Doohickey” is a response to the scale at which big tech affects all our lives, and acts as the mediator between us, and the world. The purpose of the film was to ask people to examine their own relationship with the technology they use.
Produced with Fjord, Stockholm, the purpose of the Doohickey is to spark conversations about what might be the ethical way of producing products and services for mass consumption in today’s digital world, and the ethical way to consume them. Viraj shared his film as an example of his world-building methodology. If you want to read more about his film, you can find a Medium article written by Viraj here!
Crowdsourcing a sci-fi world live!
Over the last few years, through his design futures practice, Viraj has come up with a few of his own methods and frameworks, to produce provocative, yet believable worlds for speculative design, technology research and development projects, strategic foresight, or science fiction to take place in. Through this session, he got a chance to test them with a larger audience, and produce a fun narrative live in the interactive world-building session.
According to Viraj, investigating the rules of interactions, behaviour, and living in a hypothetical future world allows us to question our status quo, and take steps to change our habits, in order to align ourselves to a path that would take us to a preferable future.
The framework used in this session involved people completing sentences started by Viraj. Viraj calls this framework “In a world where”, and for the first time ever, he got a chance to take it to a live crowd with the help of Trieuvy, Marie Louise, and Martina from the Speculative Futures Stockholm team. Each of the answers to Viraj’s prompts add colour and complexity to the scenario, and help complete the picture a little more.
This framework is available as a template for you to create your own worlds with here
Some of our participants came back to us with the worlds they built using this framework, and we think they’re great! Here they are!
If you haven’t been able to participate in this event, find the recording of the talk below.
What’s next for Speculative Futures Stockholm
The Speculative Futures Stockholm is working on an exciting plan of activities for fall 2020. Make sure you keep following our events on Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Stockholm-Speculative-Futures-Chapter
The Stockholm Chapter is composed of Daniel Petersson, Fernanda Torre, Trieuvy Luu, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Martina Eriksson, Viraj Joshi, Lequay Paul, lorenzo davoli, Johan Grönskog, Kimberley Beauprez, Johan Hammarlund. A big thank you to all of them! Please reach out to us, if you are interested in attending or joining us.
Last but not least, thank you again to all the great people who participated in our third event. Keep your eyes open for our next meet-up.
