Speculative Futures Week 1: Initial Research
Speculative Futures
The third brief has gone live and it feels more open and creatively free than the briefs prior. For this brief we are tasked to speculate on the future. We are to consider the potential changes, mutations and flux of anything from the everyday to the geopolitical landscape. We will be challenged with presenting our speculative fictions in a variety of methods.
My Initial Idea
I believe that I have a rather solid concept to begin with which was something I had been thinking about over the past couple of days. The idea is that what if we were to have some form of technological recession, perhaps a catastrophic like event such as a mass EMP (electromagnetic pulse) occurred over the UK or even the whole world which effected most if not all digital technology. How would this effect the present as well as the lifestyle of those affected? Something like this would be so detrimental due to how reliant society is to technology and communication through technology. For creating an outcome I'm a little uncertain at the moment, my initial idea was possibly to create some propaganda posters that relate to the 'event' that took place and perhaps in relation to the aftermath. These would be created using physical techniques of printing such as screen printing or lithography. Posters created using these techniques already have a rather propaganda aesthetic to them seeing that posters usually consist of a minimal colour palette and are inexpensive to produce in mass. An example of this can be found below which is a 'Misfits' poster created using screen printing.
My Initial Idea
I believe that I have a rather solid concept to begin with which was something I had been thinking about over the past couple of days. The idea is that what if we were to have some form of technological recession, perhaps a catastrophic like event such as a mass EMP (electromagnetic pulse) occurred over the UK or even the whole world which effected most if not all digital technology. How would this effect the present as well as the lifestyle of those affected? Something like this would be so detrimental due to how reliant society is to technology and communication through technology. For creating an outcome I'm a little uncertain at the moment, my initial idea was possibly to create some propaganda posters that relate to the 'event' that took place and perhaps in relation to the aftermath. These would be created using physical techniques of printing such as screen printing or lithography. Posters created using these techniques already have a rather propaganda aesthetic to them seeing that posters usually consist of a minimal colour palette and are inexpensive to produce in mass. An example of this can be found below which is a 'Misfits' poster created using screen printing.
Due to this brief being focused around speculation I wanted to mention a YouTube channel called Alternate History Hub. This channel creates content based on what if scenarios such as 'What if the Internet Never Existed' and 'What if Germany won World War 1'. These videos cover alternate timelines speculating on how life could be if a particular circumstance occurred. These Small 10-20 minute videos are really interesting combined with the cute simple illustrations, I definitely recommend giving them a watch if you're into that stuff.
Now returning to Speculative Futures and my idea for it, I don't want to spend too long trying to link the concept of the idea to creating an outcome for it. I've come to realise that in my previous projects, I have spent too long theorising, researching and coming up with a backstory only to not have a strong outcome to back it up with in comparison. For this project I intend to be a lot more hands on with prototyping and experimenting with my ideas, an issue that I have been having with constantly researching, is that I've boring myself and depriving myself a little bit from creativity and putting things to practice.
Mind Map
Like at projects it's good to do a mind map to get the creativity flowing. Below is a scan of the first overall mind map that I created for this brief. A good portion of the mind map is initially expanding and trying to make some more sense of the technological recession idea. With the addition of some other ideas I came across a rather interesting potential idea that could meet this brief. The idea is what if food and sustenance became pill form, this idea was initially looked at for my genealogies project and it would be good to work with for speculative futures.
Reverting back to one of my first blog posts on my genealogies project. What if pills such as capsules and caplets replaced our everyday food? foods such as our British Sunday roasts compacted and minimised into a single pill would be a rather interesting and concept because that could be a possible future. This idea is somewhat inspired by the movie soylant green where an over populated society is eating small green squares as a form of sustenance, minus the whole soylant green being people (spoiler alert). My idea for this is to make a brand or food line that is selling these pill products as meals, I could make lots of vector illustrations on illustrator and advertisements for the 'meals' possibly even creating a physical meal package for my outcome for this project!
I will be exploring this idea further in my next blog post for Speculative Futures.
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