After successful completion of the course, students are able to...
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further information will be announced
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A call to creatively consider our futures by guest professor Ann Light
Life will be very different over the next decades as we face interrelated crises: a failing climate, polarizing media, technocratic relations, xenophobia, falling biodiversity and societies clinging to business-as-usual. How we experience this ‘polycrisis’ varies according to the resources available to us, so poverty, inequality and injustice are big factors. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence, networked economies and ‘smart’ cities are turning people into data points, managing interpersonal relations in a context where big technology companies have as much revenue as most nations and more political power. As designers, makers and thinkers in the socio-technical realm, the relation between what happens in the world and how we understand our role has never been more important. It is a time to ask difficult questions of our technology design practices and of ourselves, putting what agency we have into opening spaces for new futures.
Course contents:
- Introduction to themes of the course.
- Utopian structures: 3 workshops for considering the socio-technical across space, time and matter.
- A group project on planet-centric design.
- Seminars that touch on:
socio-technical tensions in practice; more-than-human considerations; the importance of prefiguration, imagination and reflection; types and methods of action/resistance; opening futures.
Course schedule:
May 9 - May 24, 2023
The lecturer of this course will be Ann Light / University of Sussex.
This is a guest professor course of the TU Wien Informatics Doctoral School. It is targeted to Doctoral Students of the Faculty of Informatics, but, subject to availability of free seats, open to all PhD students and interested Master students.
Bio:
Ann Light is a design researcher and interaction theorist, specializing in participatory practice, human-technology relations and collaborative future-making. Her 25-year research career has focused on the politics, ethics and agency of design, and especially co-design in communities, exploring social activism at neighbourhood level, investigating the design of sharing structures and questioning the boundaries of participation. Regarding the social and ecological as inextricably linked, over the last few years she has turned to consider climate collapse and the stress that current systems put on the planet, believing creative remaking of relations is needed for liveable futures and looking at ways that socially engaged art and design can find potential in difficult places and offer visions of fairer worlds. She is co-creator of the CreaTures Framework, prepared as part of the European Union project Creative Practices for Transformative Futures (CreaTures: https://creatures-eu.org/) and helped lead the UK programme Social Justice in the Digital Economy.
