Bruce Sterling - Seminars / Workshops / Lectures

FUTURISM : DESIGN FICTION FOR MEDIA PHILOSOPHERS (3 credits)

Bruce Sterling

Description: "Design Fiction" is a contemporary form of forward-thinking intervention that has been enabled by the current networked media environment. The assignment in this three-day workshop is to study design fictions, understand how they work and how they fail to work, and to create a design fiction suited to the specific aims of media philosophers. Design fictions can range from very simple descriptions of postulated objects and services, to elaborate hoaxes, which may include multiple media channels, government and corporate sponsorship, and political street theater. The point of a design fiction is to seize public attention, to affect the future thinking of the viewers, and to provoke the viral spread of the message. What will really happen next? What is said to be happening next? How many archaic ideas of futurity still clutter the cultural landscape of today's network society? How can we persuade people to believe that what we say might happen next might actually happen? How do we disentangle these many rhetorical gestures from the actual drivers of change.

Objectives: How does one construct characters and sets for a design fiction? How can we create a compelling and apparently plausible future world, on a feasible budget, for a cultural intervention that may be nothing more than a very brief YouTube video? Useful methods of world-creation are discussed, including "pace layers" of nature, culture, governance, infrastructure, commerce and fashion, and "model sheets" for characters, which create consistent frameworks of appearance and behavior. This workshop concludes with a class discussion of a wide range of imagery that is actually futuristic, rhetorically "futuristic," paleo-futuristic, anachronistic, postmodern and "atemporal."

Learning Outcomes: The best way to understand the many difficulties of design fiction is to attempt to create one. Thus the workshop, which divides the students into creative, competitive teams. Suppose that the speculations of Kittler and Manovich are factually accurate. How could we create a compelling portrait of that world, as it might exist twenty years from today? What would a media philosopher of that future world look like and behave like? What benefit could such a person offer to the world? What consolations would be found in media philosophy? How could we create a compelling, cheap and virally attractive demonstration of these ideas: a vehicle that calls attention to a mode of thinking, and demonstrates its benefits to specific demographics, likely to find it on the web?

Required Readings and Assignments:

Wired - Beyond The Beyond - Design Fiction -.

Design Fiction - Podcast.

Essay on Design Science Fact and Fiction.

Found Futures Blog.

Sterling, Bruce. Shaping Things. (Mediaworks Pamphlets). The MIT Press, 2005. ISBN: 0262693267. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.

Greenfield, Adam. Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (Voices That Matter). New Riders Publishing; 1st edition, 2006. ISBN: 0321384016. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.

Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become. O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2005. ISBN: 0596007655. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.

Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Basic Books, 2003. ISBN: 0738208612. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.

Weinberger, David. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Times Book, 2007. ISBN: 0805080430. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.

Tapscott, Don and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Portfolio Hardcover, 2006. ISBN: 1591841380. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.

Anderson, Chris. Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. Hyperion; Rev Upd edition, 2008. ISBN: 1401309666. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.

Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor, 2005. ISBN: 0385721706. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.

CYBEROCRACY: TOMORROW NOW (3 credits)

Bruce Sterling

Description: Discusses in an intensive dialogue with a prolific science fiction writer, also one of the leading web theorists, recent developments in cyberspace and explores futurist options.