Design Futures
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Final Report submitted to the Mayor and Honolulu Arts Alliance. This report summarizes the activities of FoundFutures (Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy), and many other collaborators and participants, in the Fall of 2007 to provoke and engage citizens, business owners, and leaders in a wide-spread and inclusive community futures initiative.
from David A.M Goldberg:
"Birdcage," the story of the 2016 H8N2 or "Hang Ten Flu" flu epidemic in Hawai'i, is the most thoroughly realized. FoundFutures, led by University of Hawai'i graduate students Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy, crafted everything from the government's quarantine zone maps to this-property-is-condemned posters, to the 9/11-style missing-persons fliers that citizens would post in the wake of forced quarantines. The finishing touch is a tourism poster for Maui (unscathed by the flu, how?) which proudly declares that the island is "Still Paradise."
Typically cinema is the chosen medium for visualizing the future. By installing elements of their projects in the urban fabric itself, FoundFutures turns Chinatown into a movie set of sorts, approaching the level of production design that goes into films like "Children of Men."
In Futures Work, our core research materials are images of the future. Metaphors of the future tend to be dominated by the eye and the sense of vision. In science fiction, futures tend toward ocularcentrism. We “envision” the future in terms of what we can see. The reason why I chose the works in this set is because they engage senses other than sight. In essence, they make other futures “sensible.”
We are trying to recalibrate people's reality, but there is room for playfulness, ambiguity, and what we might call scientifically rigorous poetic license. Repugnance is a powerful string to pluck, and it should be done delicately and sparingly. But, if done right, it can have a tangible effect on how people see the world, and how they act.
As futures practice strives towards greater effectiveness, the foresight and design fields are in the process of discovering, learning from and remixing with each other. This paper offers a case study of an experiential futures/design fiction project co-created with workshop participants at the inaugural Emerge festival, an explicitly futures-themed hybrid arts and science event staged at Arizona State University in the city of Phoenix in 2012. The People Who Vanished was a live intervention, via performance and associated artifacts created for the occasion, reflecting on a possible future for the Phoenix area.