Abstract
Relating the concepts of value-sensitive design to decolonial theory, we will describe our attempts to activate resistance to the foundations of modern technicity through a game called Reimagining the Now, which we designed for the Digital Democracies Institute in Vancouver, BC, Canada. We argue that, as digital technologies become embedded in every facet of society, any hope of a digital democracy requires sustained public discourse, imagination, and action that goes beyond an understanding of how digital technologies work, towards a comprehension of the value systems, contexts, and consequences of their creation. To do this we devised a custom card set and large paper playmat as a speculative prompt to help participants rethink existing technologies through different value sets, to imagine with us what a digital democracy — and the world it brings with it — might look like. As part of a larger research endeavour, the game experiments with using speculative design methods as fertile spaces for generating a critical imaginary as a productive way to invite publics to think past taken for granted ideas of ‘what is’ towards ‘how what is’ and ‘what could be’.
Keywords
Ontologically Orientated design; Value-sensitive design; techno-social futures; Speculative design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0039
Citation
Russell, G.,and Badke, C.(2021) Negotiating the Possible Through the Artificial, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0039
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Negotiating the Possible Through the Artificial
Relating the concepts of value-sensitive design to decolonial theory, we will describe our attempts to activate resistance to the foundations of modern technicity through a game called Reimagining the Now, which we designed for the Digital Democracies Institute in Vancouver, BC, Canada. We argue that, as digital technologies become embedded in every facet of society, any hope of a digital democracy requires sustained public discourse, imagination, and action that goes beyond an understanding of how digital technologies work, towards a comprehension of the value systems, contexts, and consequences of their creation. To do this we devised a custom card set and large paper playmat as a speculative prompt to help participants rethink existing technologies through different value sets, to imagine with us what a digital democracy — and the world it brings with it — might look like. As part of a larger research endeavour, the game experiments with using speculative design methods as fertile spaces for generating a critical imaginary as a productive way to invite publics to think past taken for granted ideas of ‘what is’ towards ‘how what is’ and ‘what could be’.