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