Many times we think about the future, but rarely we do sit down to analyze possible scenarios in some years and see how they could be changed. This class has been one of the classes that has made me think the most about these speculative futures and have a critical thought about the moment in which we live and how we can ask questions that invite things to change.
The "Everything Manifesto" of I.am is a treatise of questions that for a moment explode your head putting you to think that the world is screwed and that there is nothing to do, but in the end, they ask you some questions as a hypothesis that make you reflect on how we can change it.
The Everything manifesto is a collection of proposals for changing humans complicated relationship with change. Each proposal is framed as a hypothetical question to use and debrief our collective imaginations, because hypotheticals are a fascinating way to learn how to think and can help us better understand something as complex as reality, by dealing with the powerful concept of “what if”. Iam
The manifesto speaks about the concept of everything, meaning everything like that "Pale Blue Dot", like everything around us and how everything affects, and therefore, everything matters. We talk about data, social media, artificial intelligence, digital pollution, the time we spend giving away data and abusing cell phones, and also how we should stop using the term "climate change" for something that has already become in a "Climate Emergency".
What happens when billions of humans, spend billions of seconds using billions of smartphones, concentrating money and power in the hands of a few billionaires who run corporations that manufacture billions of devices made of rare minerals used to extract and process billions of data points in data centers that consume billions of kilowatt-hours of electricity-generating billions of tons of carbon emissions? Iam
After opening our heads, they put us to raise speculative futures and tell them as a trailer for a science fiction series like "Black Mirror", mixing two of the concepts of the 10 "What If?" questions. I liked the dynamic of the class, because we worked as a group, with time limits and making collective decisions what meant that we had to interact, listen and be worth everyone's points, even for the time to qualify ourselves.
We created a production company among the whole class and decided to call it "Zero Sum." Then we divided into groups, and with my group we worked with the concepts of TIME and ENERGY, and we decided to create a story in a futuristic world destroyed by humanity about a utopian place where not everyone had access, and where they still breathed clean air , they lived in a sustainable way and where you could only enter if you reduced your carbon footprint to zero. Inspired a bit in the speculative story that I uploaded before.
In the end, this class leaves us with an open mind to new possibilities, teaching us to see everything in a more critical and analytical way, asking us intelligent questions that can solve problems. This format of the questions "What If?" I used it as part of my Design Space, as a form of inspiration related to different facts that I found about agriculture, climate change, food and poverty in the world.
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