Speculative Design
(Phase 2 Development)
On Monday, we made posters of our theme as if no one had heard of it before. How would we introduce our topic to the world? I picked the idea of “Ball-Jointed Dolls”, and I imagined a world with them that they were new beings/creatures, playing into the idea of BJDs as human-lite. Hence, the Alien Predator or Fashion logo. I didn’t have many words and images to work with, so it’s very loosely based on BJDS. We had a 45-minute time limit to stop us from doing too much. I think this set a nice pace for us to be able to browse the magazines and actually finish the work in the session time.
Second Half
In our second task, we had to choose a topic and come up with ideas about what a scientist, a politician and a philosopher would think of the topic. My classmates and group, Riya, Gabi, Rosie and I chose Rosie’s theme of “Stars” as we think it could be simple enough to explore differing opinions of. Here are some of the thoughts for each character:
- Scientist:
- There can’t be a reasonable explanation for this?
- Is this a new lifeform in space?
- How could we utilise these stars to further humanity’s progress?
- Politician:
- Stars should be banned; we built our way of life around being in the dark.
- Stars are scaring people; they aren’t naturally occurring.
- We should have a meeting with the UN to discuss what stars mean to humanity in the future.
- Philosopher:
- Maybe the stars are trying to tell us something — could they be guides?
- We are so insignificant as a species – there are greater lifeforms out of reach.
- Stars are our hope. We were in the dark for so long, and now there is light to show us we aren’t alone.
I liked this exercise as it made us think of our topic in a non-linear way and helped us break it down for those who don’t understand it at all. I think Stars was a good choice, and I’m sure lots of game ideas could come out of these thoughts and questions alone.