Global Futures Lab
“ Many futures exist, no one is more important than another, no one is ahead or behind, different dreams dreamed through the lens of deeply contextual and subjective visions”
read a book chapter about this project here
everything about the project and all the authors of the projects presented in this page @ globalfutureslab.com
“Design Fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change” (Bruce Sterling)”. This way of looking at product design is part of the broader discourse that identifies Critical and Speculative Design as a new methodological framework in which objects are seen as facilitators of conversations rather than goods to be bought or used. In the last two decades, an impressive creative effort has been dedicated to this field producing an infinite variety of scenarios and fostering rich debates about ethics, technology, and society. However, the great majority of those future visions was and still is, a mere representation of the fears and the dreams of a restricted part of the global community. Also, the general aesthetic of that body of work has been strongly identifiable with a recognizable taste, sometimes coming from the Holliwoodesque imaginary or from the dominating design establishment’s style. The Global Futures Lab consists of a series of international workshops aiming to get rid of the whole stereotypes related to the so called “western futures” and rather trying to create responses to specific futures linked to specific geo-cultural locations. Students around the globe have been invited to reflect on their own environments, their traditions and believes, and to envision futures respectful of their cultural needs and coherent with their own idea of progress. In opposition to a diffuse technological determinism, where society seems shaped by new technologies, the Global Futures Lab wants to endorse a sort of “cultural determinism” in which any idea of future should be built on with localized visions and with the main intention to open a debate about a pluralistic perspective. Here a collection of images of selected works produced during the workshops set in five different locations: Isfahan (Iran), Ahmedabad (India), Lima (Peru), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Havana (Cuba).