Tales of Tomorrow
Rewriting the future
As an addendum for my master thesis, I designed an interactive website to display the results of my speculative workshops. The goal of this website is to illustrate the fictional nature of technological progress, and the power of narratives in shaping our shared understanding of the future. The result is a digital collection of potential futures that the audience can further interactively explore and expand.
Many thanks to Thomas Guthruf for the development of the website.
Speculative Workshops
Through the workshops I employed a mix of digital and physical speculative design techniques to collect perspectives about potential future technologies and their ramifications. Taking inspiration from the Ethnographic Experiential Futures guideline of designers Stuart Candy and Kelly Kornet, I approached the creation of this website through an iterative loop of mapping the audience’s ideas about the future, multiplying these visions, and making them experienceable.
Science Fiction
Workshops are an important part of my process because, like a diegetic prototype, they exist in a place between what is real and what is imaginary. Similar to Science Fiction, workshops act upon the dual imagination; participants are aware of creating fictional scenarios within the space of a workshop, but at the same time they suspend disbelief and find themselves reflecting seriously through the consequences of their stories.
Technology Stack
The Website is built with Vue for the frontend, and Node.js for the backend. The node structure is built with the JavaScript framework force-graph, which allows the users to iterate upon the previous ideas, by adding either a text or a picture drawn within the application.