The year is 3052. You are a non-human archeologist on an excavation site called Earth, and you find fossilized data from the everyday belongings of a former people. Your job? You must reconstruct the devices these data came from. What were these data used for? How did they play a role in this former people’s daily life? Could they have been the reason behind this civilization’s extinction?
Workshop purpose:
In this“past-casting” archeology workshop we will objectively analyze the digital shadows of today’s technologies to imagine fictional tech that could have been responsible for devastating futures. By framing our current relationship with technology as unfamiliar, we can stretch our minds to imagine better(or worse) uses for the data we consume and produce. The aim is to challenge ourselves to generate potential futures by defining our present as if it were a past.Â
Workshop structure:
A brief presentation with some archeological and design thinking background to set the scene for the workshop.
Participants are split into small groups and given USB sticks with 2-4 random data artifacts(Including but not limited to: video from a cctv, a log of temperature changes, a sonar recording, family photos, keystroke logs, web history, a file directory, etc, etc.)
Groups will reconstruct these snippets to create an anthropological narrative around a fictional artifact/product/service/device that utilizes all the given pieces of data.
Groups present a prototype/demonstration/visualization of their artifact to the class.
Workshop and collective outputs will be documented and made available online.
Workshop purpose:
Workshop structure: