Futuristic Features
Worldbuilding for Design Education: Fictional Nation Designs from the Past, Present and Future
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lee Zelenak, Heather Snyder Quinn, Heather Snyder Quinn
As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, we are met with an overwhelming sense of uncertainty about our collective futures and identities. We question the power structures and systems that underlie the fabric of our life—whether capitalist, religious, alien, or otherworldly, and wonder about their influence over our future rights and freedoms. The student projects featured in this presentation offer alternate ways of considering the idea of a “nation” and use design fiction to create provocations to unsettle the present limitations of our minds. From peaceful utopias to unsettling technocratic states ruled by FAAGM*, Worldbuilding: Fictional Nation Designs from the Past, Present, and Future presents an array of speculative societies that exist across time. From the revisionist history of the utopian nation of Föhn located in the quiet mountainous sanctum in the Alps; the futuristic land of Delta—a colonized stratosphere, inhabited by evolved human lifeforms; the otherworldly nation of Holy Land—an afterlife devoid of earthly freedoms; to the technocratic nations of Primeland, The Nation of Fulfillment, and The District of Google Drive, these nation’s narratives are explored through “real” artifacts (flags, currency, uniforms, food) and “factual” accounts (public brand manifestos, style guides, and historical guidebooks) chronicling evolution, social unrest, customs, governments, design systems, speculative interfaces, and more. We present both the plausible and impossible within these stories, hoping to convey a taste of the many possibilities our future world(s) can hold.
Cloud Theory: Seeing Shapes in Clouds with an AI Companion
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Colleen Macklin
Cloud Theory is an experimental videogame that explores apophenia, the psychological phenomenon of seeing patterns where none exist. We see shapes in clouds, but we also infer meaning from the GPT-based dialogue we have with an AI companion in the game. If language based machine learning models are simply stringing together words based on algorithmic probability, our minds are ‘apophenia engines’ that perceive meaning, intentionality, and life in digital worlds. How different is this process in simulated worlds from the meaning we perceive in the real world? Is the mind simply a sophisticated probability engine? As Anil Seth describes, is perception a form of hallucination? Cloud Theory is an attempt to ask these and other questions about the nature of intelligence and perception in an entertaining and playful way. See images from the game here: https://www.colleenmacklin.com/clouds
Featured Transparent Garments and Image-Clothing: On the Digitalization of Fashion and the Loss of Enclothed Knowledge
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cyana Djoher Anaïs Hadjali
This paper examines how the digitalization of fashion design practices intensifies the primacy of visual immediacy, contributing to the displacement of what Ben Barry terms enclothed knowledge: the embodied, relational, and generative understanding of clothing as a site of lived and sensorial experience. Within today’s cultural regime, garments are increasingly designed, consumed, and circulated as images, curated for their visual impact across digital platforms, rather than for their tactile, gestural, or somatic affordances. The current modes of fashion production, consumption, and visualization enable the progressive erasure of a dialogic relationship with garments as co-agents of the body. I argue that this aesthetic shift results in a form of transparency: clothing no longer mediates between self and other but becomes a surface for instant legibility and self-donation. The dematerialization of consumption (e-commerce, Web 3.0) and the virtualization of dissemination (Web 2.0, social networks) unravel our embodied connection to dress. Verticalized (scroll-based), algorithmically shaped, and bi-dimensionally framed within screens, fashion is mediated through images as associative cues (Küchler, 2005), rather than as structuring forces of imagination (Brady, 1998). Rather than enhancing subjectivity, this condition paradoxically incapacitates it: aesthetic experience is reduced to its communicative function. The garment ceases to shelter ambiguity, becoming a performative interface emptied of interiority for tactile and visual concerns. Drawing on somaesthetics, and aesthetic materialism, this paper interrogates the consequences of fashion’s visual hegemony and proposes a renewed ethics of re-embodied, re-materialized design.
