Reimagining the Now: A Pedagogical

Tool for Thinking Through Design

Gillian Russell Abstract Emily Carr University of Art This short paper demonstrates what critical design and Design pedagogy can bring to disciplines outside of design. We Vancouver, V5T 0H2, Canada briefly discuss some viewpoints on what a critical [email protected] design pedagogy might require, then introduce a game designed for the workshop Imagining the Possible Craig Badke through the Artificial, at the Digital Democracies Media Emily Carr University of Art and Communication Conference in Vancouver, Canada, and Design May 2019. As part of a larger research endeavour, the Vancouver, V5T 0H2, Canada game experiments with using critical design as a [email protected] pedagogical approach for media studies, as a means to invite non-designers to think past taken for granted Garnet Hertz ideas of ‘what is’ towards ‘how what is’ and ‘what could Emily Carr University of Art be’. Our objective is not to turn people into critical and Design designers, but to employ critical design as a process for Vancouver, V5T 0H2, Canada circumventing established structures of knowledge [email protected] production in order to develop new transdisciplinary ways to challenge how we think, imagine, see and hear.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for Author Keywords personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that critical design, pedagogy, techno-social futures, critical copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights imaginary, value-sensitive design. for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CHI 2020 Extended Abstracts, April 25–30, 2020, Honolulu, HI, USA. © 2020 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6819-3/20/04. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.

Introduction such, we see the opportunity for employing critical While many perspectives exist about what critical design as a pedagogical tool as not only a valuable design can contribute to design education, we see a asset in educating designers, but also as a tool for role for critical design as a pedagogical tool for many other disciplines to embrace a radical rethinking disciplines outside of design. We argue that this through the mechanisms, logics, and activities of practice can open up spaces for non-designers to critical design. This requires a mobilization of an question and imagine – to not only think what the ontological understanding of design that goes beyond world could be, but, also, to find new perspectives on the functionalist, rationalistic and industrial perceptions reality as it is. [1] of the field. As the anthropologist Arturo Escobar notes, “design is ontological in that it is a conversation about Cultural theorist Simon Sheikh [2] has written about possibilities” [4, p.110]. In other words, design the distinctions between knowledge and thinking. He generates structures of possibility. As Winograd and argues that knowledge is something that holds you Flores contend, “we encounter the deep question of back, inscribes you within a tradition, while thinking design when we recognize that in designing tools we implies networks of indiscipline, lines of flight, and are designing ways of being” [5, p.xi]. questionings. In other words, thinking allows you to pay attention to other possibilities, to imagine and see This unveiling of an ontology of design demands an differently. examination into the affordances of our tools, emphasizing how certain design choices bring forward Critical Design has particular qualities when it comes to particular ways of being. It also helps develop new thinking through design. It employs the imaginary as a ground for more pluralistic ways of imagining and means of challenging assumptions in our world, in constructing our futures [4]. hopes of encouraging people to question established world views – how they are formed, reproduced, and Reimagining the Now Game maintained – while offering alternative narratives and The following contribution outlines one particular possibilities to the status quo [1]. According to design project we think exemplifies how critical design can be theorist Clive Dilnot, critical design has the potential to used as a pedagogical tool in other disciplines. Our offer a space for being able to think about thinking focus is on how the project serves to support students, differently about the present: a space for thinking professionals and researchers of media and about the possible [3]. communication to gain a more in-depth insight into the unseen or unacknowledged values reflected in our The transformation we are calling for goes beyond current technocultures. Our wider aim was to re-invent, thinking design education as a way to learn about map, form and rethink our technologies through design or even to learn how to design. Instead, we different value systems as a means to offer new ways acknowledge its potential as a strategic intervention of thinking the world we inhabit, and the possibilities that can result in altering situations from within. As for its future.

understand our technologies, and “because we are completely entangled with them, this understanding cannot be limited to the practicalities of how things work: it must extend to how things came to be, and how they continue to function in the world in ways that are often invisible and interwoven. [6, p.3]”

To do this, we designed a custom card set and large paper playmat as a speculative prompt to help the workshop participants rethink existing technologies in different ways, to imagine with us what a digital democracy — and the world it brings with it — might look like. The game, Reimagining the Now, ultimately asks players to question and deconstruct latent assumptions around specific everyday technologies in order to highlight how existing technological Figure 1: Reimagining the Now Game infrastructures can be re-imagined and redesigned around different sets of cultural values. Negotiating the Possible through the Artificial was a workshop run by the authors as part of The Digital To start the game, workshop participants are divided Democracies 2019 Conference: Artificial Publics, Just into groups of 3 to 5 people. Each group is set up with Infrastructures, Ethical Learning hosted by Simon their own playmat and deck of cards consisting of two Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. The event suits – infrastructure cards, and value cards. Play brought together an international group of experts and unfolds for each group as a critical design charrette in students of media studies and technology to consider three phases: ‘The Now’, ‘Value Sets’, and ’A New questions like ‘Can democracy survive the internet?’, Now.’ One of the drivers for developing the elements of ‘What is an ethics of AI?’ and ultimately ‘What has the game comes from sociologists and philosophers of happened with our digital infrastructures and What can technology [7-9] who have raised major concerns that we do?’ The conference organizers were interested in technologies are complicit in many of the challenges we what we as designers could contribute to the debate. face today: social isolation, echo chambers, global Instead of approaching the workshop as a space to disinformation, racism, and mass surveillance. As respond to what design has done, we used a series of digital technologies become embedded in every facet of core techniques from critical design to invite society, any hope of a digital democracy requires us to participants to unveil the history of our digital tools and develop alternative ways of thinking about technology to imagine different possibilities for their future. As and ‘technicity’ [10] Part of this, we argue, centers on James Bridle argues, there is an urgent need to better an awareness of the complex entanglements of

technologies, capitalism, and cultural values that make chosen infrastructure. Together, the Value Cards up our modern world. represent a diverse selection of underrepresented value positions that are set in stark contrast to modernist The Now principles of efficiency, convenience and progress. They The game begins with each group drawing a digital include perspectives such as ‘indigenous ways of infrastructure card from their deck. Examples include knowing’, ‘slowness’, ‘inconvenient’, and ‘non- ‘Google Maps’, ‘Alexa’, ‘Search Engine’ and ‘Fitbit’. anthropocentric’, among others. Players are asked to forensically investigate their chosen infrastructure from multiple perspectives to As these values are potentially less familiar to articulate its intended and unintended consequences. participants, additional time is set aside to discuss and The playmat provides space to write the social, unpack their meanings and participants’ own environmental, political, and cultural concerns raised in interpretations. This deliberation stage serves as a way the group’s discussion. to develop a set of design criteria for the next phase of play. As the game progresses, each group is prompted to dive in deeper and complicate their discussions using a A New Now series of prompts printed on their playmats. These The final phase of the game entails imagining a new prompts are adapted from LM Sacasas’ Do artifacts infrastructure based strictly upon the alternative value

have ethics? [11] and include questions such as: What set chosen and interpreted by the group. Participants Figure 2: Digital Infrastructure practices does the use of this technology displace? How collectively use the playmat to design, sketch, and/or Card sample does the use of this technology affect my experience of describe their imagined infrastructure. The goal is not place? How does the use of this technology shape my necessarily to give us a new Alexa or improve upon

vision of a good life? What assumptions about the world Google Maps or Fitbit, but to imagine a new technology does the use of this technology tacitly encourage? that reflects the goal or function of the original infrastructure – a digital assistant, a way finding tool, By stimulating further conversations among members or an activity tracker – but designed for a world that of each group, this critical investigation phase helps truly supports the alternative values proposed. The pull out hidden, unacknowledged, or taken-for-granted game ultimately brings players in dialogue with a more values. Sarcasas’ questions highlight priorities that diverse range of perspectives (decolonial, shape technological infrastructures and provide a intersectional, pluriversal) and the possibilities that grounding for concerns about the complex ways might come from designing our world from these technologies weave through and shape our societies. values.

Value Sets In phase two of the game, participants select a Value Figure 3: Value Card sample Card that serves as the basis for reimagining their

Outcomes and Conclusion patterns of local flora and fauna. They imagined that with this system, cities might eventually even be shaped differently around migration corridors and other than human needs. A second group drew Search Engine with Indigenous Ways of Knowing as their value set. They proposed a new kind of digital platform that would provide answers to each query as a collection of stories gathered from members of the community. Answers here, were told through poetry, fables, and myth, encouraging the searcher to find meaning in what was provided.

In this way, Reimagining the Now provides participants with an opportunity to discover what is hidden from view and to imagine alternative socio-technical futures that work to open up new possibilities for social responsibility, equality and justice in a post-digital world.

In line with Bridle’s theory [6], the game uses critical design techniques to allow participants the opportunity Figure 4: Reimagining the Now Game – workshop to discuss the radical ways digital technologies reshape civic perceptions and ways of being, while providing Several iterations of the workshop have taken place participants with critical and creative tools for a digital since our pilot for the Digital Democracies Conference democracy. in May 2019. Outcomes from these workshops yielded results that ranged from subtle changes to radically As a pedagogical tool, the game creates conditions for rethinking digital infrastructures. One group who drew thinking our technologies anew. By using methods of Google Maps with a Non-Anthropocentric value set, critical design, Reimagining the Now invites non- imagined a way-finding application that mapped designers to think through design methods and tactics through phenological cycles and routed people and as a means to question the worlds we experience traffic around the seasonal cycles and migration through our technologies, while making tangible the ideologies that make them the way they are.

Figure 5: Reimagining the Now - Playmat References Acknowledgements [1] Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative We would like to thank Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and the Everything: Design Fiction and Social Dreaming. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Digital Democracies Group and the Digital Humanities Lab at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, as [2] Simon Sheikh. 2009. Objects of Study or Commodification of Knowledge? Remarks on well as the University of California Irvine for hosting our Artistic Research. Art & Research: A Journal of workshops. We would like to thank SSHRC Canada Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, 2: 1-8. Research Chair for their funding of the project. We also [3] Clive Dilnot. The Science of Uncertainty: The acknowledge that Emily Carr University of Art and Potential Contribution of Design to Knowledge. Design operates on the unceded traditional territories 2014. Retrieved July 12, 2015 from of the Coast Salish peoples of the Tsleil-Waututh, http://thenewschoolhistory.org/wp- Squamish, and Musqueam Nations.

content/uploads/2014/07/dilnot_scienceuncertaint y-web-11.pdf. [4] Arturo Escobar. 2017. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. [5] Winograd and Flores 1986 cited in Escobar 2017. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press, Durham, NC: 110. [6] James Bridle. 2018. The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Verso, London. [7] Wendy Chun. 2016. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. [8] Neil Postman. Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. 1998. Retrieved January 20, 2019 from https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/18 8/materials/postman.pdf. [9] Andrew Feenberg. 2010. Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. [10] Richard Beardsworth. 1998. Thinking technicity. Cultural Values 2, 1: 70-86. [11] L.M. Sacasas. Do artifacts have ethics? 2014. Retrieved September 12, 2018 from https://thefrailestthing.com/2014/11/29/do- artifacts-have-ethics/.