Mr Smith demonstrating his usual good sense
(…)
What could be the methods you can imagine for a more systematic documentation of the design fictions?
There is Vera-Karina Gebhardt, a PhD student, who documents the process of having the public engaged in speculative scenarios or in workshops that require scenario creation and prototyping.
She was with us at the FutureEverything prototyping workshop we did in Singapore last week which outputs were exhibited in the Art Science Museum in Singapore. She went through a careful analysis and assessment of the whole process with a rigorous observation of the process, of the interactions, of the participants feeling about the process, and of the public acceptance or interaction with the prototypes. She noticed that usually in museum people stepped back and didn’t want to touch the prototypes and they just looked at the explanatory boards that are built on the pedestals.
Although, for this exhibition, the curators did a really nice thing by holding on to the raw material of the workshop that otherwise people would sweep into the trash. They put those alongside the prototypes so people could see the ingredients before the dish. Thanks to that, they could begin to think about the connections between the insights, the ideas, the discussions and sketching were the final scenarios came from. They didn’t see just the final speculative prototype, they saw the whole process of creation and ingredients that came into it.
That is, for me, very interesting. From my perspective, working more at the front-end of the process, I would really like to understand this process in a more detailed fashion. Maybe we could use ethnography to trace those thread of ideas: which ideas are successful, which are not, which make through the prototype, which don’t…. For that, either you do it or you observe it, it’s hard to do both. In the end, it boils down to a resource issue. I am very interested in understanding, refining and iterating on this process to know how people react on it. This is for me more interesting that just having a final artefact to donate to a museum….
