It’s nearing the end of February 2020. We (the UAL Team) have facilitated our first workshop with postgraduate students from the UAL community in early February (see Silke Lange’s blog post “Hacking Futures – Futures Hacking: reflection on co-created futures”) which gave us the opportunity to test out the first iteration of four of the final 40 Future Philosophical Pills, which at that time were initial draft containers for information (see Fig 1). Through a process of collaboration and co-creation with our postgraduate student cohort, we realised that we had to crystallise aspects of content and design a system to engage with it in order to make the Philosophical Pills, well, digestible.

Fig 1. Initial ‘containers’ for the Future Philosophical Pills. 7 February 2020 © James Bryant, 2020.

As we closed the Hacking Futures – Futures Hacking workshop in February, the students were vocal in their interest in supporting the development of the Future Philosophical Pills through another workshop. Not only would this provide a timeframe with which we could develop the Philosophical Pills, but also another opportunity for students across the UAL campuses to come together to co-produce, facilitating cross-cultural communication and connection as a community of practice in order to think, make and learn (Eyler 2018).  We eagerly set a date for a follow up workshop.

It’s early March 2020. Through design development and iteration, we created print-and-play card decks for the Philosophical Pills, containing nine clusters (each cluster containing four Philosophical pills) along with ten groups of Prompts ranging from side effects to ingredients that could be drawn upon to activate the Pills. We have refined our materials and I can feel the energy building as we prepare to come together again as a team and facilitate another workshop when something from the pluriverse arrives…

The emergence of Covid-19 has started to take effect globally and countries within Europe are starting to close their borders in a bid to slow transmission. I am based in Berlin and it became clear that I would not be able to be physically present in the workshop and that we were going to test out supporting from a remote perspective. This is not to say that this form of working was totally new to us: I had been working remotely or at distance since the project started and our wheels were somewhat greased. We work well as a team, utilising different platforms such as SharePoint for project organisation or WhatsApp to communicate with each other as and when these are needed but this was different. A precursor to what was to become the ‘new normal’, this was a remote facilitation pilot.

Fig 2. Blended facilitation. 6 March 2020 © James Bryant, 2020.

I began to realise what now seems commonplace – collaborating in a remote context requires a different, repurposed set of skills. The ingredients that facilitate facilitation like body language, the natural flow of conversation (or knowing when to contribute so that it doesn’t feel like an interjection) and the subtle cues that you pick up from one another by being in the same physical space are removed, reduced to a 15-inch digital frame through which you have to push (sometimes strain) your charisma through in order to keep the connection (not talking bandwidth here), energy and group ‘moving’. This was a new experience for me with which to reflect, learn, iterate and apply.

Fig 3. Blended facilitation. 6 March 2020 © James Bryant, 2020.

The pandemic presented a pivot point for us in relation to the Future Philosophical Pills, for our planned event Speculative Space and raised key questions as to how we approach collaboration, teaching and learning, design practice and…being human.

John Heskett (2002, p. 6-7) argues that the history of design can be seen as a process of layering:

… in which new developments are added over time to what already exists. This layer, moreover, is not just a process of accumulation or aggregation, but a dynamic interaction in which each new innovative stage changes the role, significance, and function of what survives.

The pandemic may not have presented a new development, more so a point of transition or a portal between one world and the next (Roy, 2020), with which we were propelled to rethink and innovate on what we had achieved so far. Perhaps, without the pandemic, the next Pills iteration would have been to reconfigure the content into an online interactive tool. Due to the pandemic this became an imperative next step.

We began to focus our efforts on iterating our materials and developing the ‘journeys’ that could unfold when utilising the Pills and Prompts in order to feed into the development of an ‘beta’ interactive tool.

It’s October 2020. The materials we have co-created for the Future Philosophical Pills have been made available on the Fuel4Design site. Most importantly, Speculative Space will happen as an online experience. Thus, we have created an initial iteration of the Future Philosophical Pills as an online interactive tool. Thinking back to the first pilot of remote facilitation in March and all the subsequent teaching and learning I have facilitated online, I prepare myself for the upcoming event – our team running through the ‘participant journeys’ on the multiple platforms we would be utilising for the day.

Fig 4. Speculative Space, Miro board. 6 October 2020.

Speculative Space provided a key opportunity for us to gain insights as to how our partners and critical friends within design and pedagogy engaged with the tools and importantly, in an online facilitated environment across multiple platforms. Insights that would not only help in fine tuning ways to engage with the Pills but also our approaches to online facilitation.

Looking back over the past year, developing the Future Philosophical Pills during a global pandemic has not only encouraged us to explore and design tools to facilitate philosophy in action but also, as educators through practice-led teaching, to innovate what we do and how we do it to meet the demands and challenges of this very specific situation.

Fig 5. Speculative Space on MS Teams, Europe. 6 October 2020.

References:

Eyler, J. (2018). How humans learn: The science and stories behind effective college teaching. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

Heskett, J. (2002). Toothpicks and logos: Design in everyday life. New York: Oxford University Press.

Roy, A. (2020). ‘The pandemic is a portal’, The Financial Times. 3 April. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca (Accessed: 24 January 2021).

At the beginning of February 2020, we, the UAL team: Betti Marenko, Pras Gunasekera, and I, facilitated a workshop with Masters students from across UAL. Earlier in the year, we had sent out a call to our postgraduate student community, reaching out to various disciplines, with the aim of creating a transdisciplinary learning environment, in which practices of exchange and interaction could inform our ongoing research for Fuel4Design. Following a positive response to the call, we selected a group of 22 students from subjects including: material futures, art and science, innovation management, and applied imagination. Hacking Futures – Futures Hacking was ready to go!

The collaboration with students has been a priority for us in this project. Developing, testing and implementing new approaches and resources without students’ input would simply have been wrong. After all, we were aiming to equip both learners and educators with innovative and adaptable tools to imagine, perform and enact a plurality of futures by design. This process had to be led by co-creation.

The relevance of co-creation in higher education is not a new concept, and has previously been highlighted by Chemi and Krogh ‘for a future that needs to strengthen human relationships and practices of sharing, the ability (or disposition) of creating a shared value in spite of differences is strategically fundamental’ (2017, p. x). In a world in which diverse cultures, disciplines and generations have to come together to meet challenges we don’t yet know of or understand, collaboration and co-creation is crucial. Teaching and learning methods that served the age of industrialisation are no longer relevant and need to be replaced with approaches that recognise the value of positionality, empathy and multiple perspectives. The Philosophical Pills to be tested in the workshop were precisely facilitating such an approach: affording a lens through which students could take a renewed look at their design practice. Pills such as Speculation, Counterfactuals, Heterotopias, Divination provided different ways of thinking about the future.

Hacking Futures – Futures Hacking created a space for philosophy in action, with the architecture of the workshop space inviting students to engage in a number of activities. These included a silent brainstorm exploring questions such as: How do you imagine futures through your practice? What do you see? What concerns do you have? What issues? and ‘Futures’ collage building – think in images not words (Fig. 1). We engaged in collective sense-making and individual reflection. Instead of reproducing knowledge, students were encouraged to co-produce knowledge – the pills are an accelerating tool for such processes – encouraging knowledge exchange and knowledge co-production.

Figure 1: Futures’ collage building – think in images, not words. © James Bryant, 2020

We were using pre-designed templates to guide the process and encouraged students to populate a Padlet wall (Fig.2) to create a virtual exhibition of their findings and key stages in their development process. The workshop was full of energy, intelligence and creativity – all of which fed into the approach and tool we were testing.

Figure 2: Padlet wall displaying virtual exhibition of process and students’ findings.

During the evaluation of the workshop, students expressed their appreciation of having been able to participate. They very much valued the approach we had taken – for students, the workshop has been a new approach to teaching design, not only the tools we are developing as part of Fuel4Design. According to students, Hacking Futures – Futures Hacking provided a learning environment in which they were enabled to: share concerns, feel nurtured, enriched and empowered, develop collective understanding, connect their values, no longer think and make in isolation, find a common language, and create a community.

I am writing these reflections almost one year later, in January 2021. Shortly after Hacking Futures – Futures Hacking, COVID-19 began to spread across the globe, interrupting the way in which humans interact. Workshops, like the one described above, in which the physical proximity between the participants contributed to building trust and created the sense of community students were yearning for, transitioned online. Face-to-face, in-person meetings of any kind were postponed until further notice, and traveling between countries was restricted to essential purposes only. Unexpectedly, the very future of the Fuel4Design project itself had to be reconsidered. We had to turn the imposition into an opportunity, embrace the challenge and learn how to collaborate and co-create whilst socially distancing.

References

Chemi, T. and Krogh, L. (2017) ed. Co-Creation in Higher Education: Students and Educators Preparing Creatively and Collaboratively to the Challenge of the Future, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam.

As the PI of the Future Philosophical Pills I found myself in the unexpected and slightly paradoxical situation of being right in the middle of a project about future speculation, the unknown and landscapes of uncertainty when the project  was derailed by the onset of the current pandemic. Suddenly, the very instrument (the Future Philosophical Pills) that we were developing at UAL with the purpose of amplifying the range of potential futures that can be imagined, anticipated and speculated upon, hit, quite literally a wall. With Covid-19 brutally rewriting our present, the notion of future we were handling in our intellectual output had to be re-assessed.

It’s March 2020. The UAL team is due to host Speculative Space, a three-day training event for a large international group of design educators at the Design Museum in London. A key purpose of this event is to present the Future Philosophical Pills and introduce them to our colleagues with a series of hands-on training sessions. The idea is to live-test the deck of cards we have created in the previous months (through a series of iterative workshops with our postgraduate students – see Silke Lange’s blog post “Hacking Futures – Futures Hacking: reflection on co-created futures”). The cards offer a way to interrogate and craft potential futures, using an inquiry into chance (the random draw of the card) as an opportunity to build meaningful, unexpected and open-ended trajectories of knowledge production around futures. We have designed print-and-play card prototypes and assembled a number of hard copies of the decks for immediate play. We are ready.

Figure 1. Preparing the cards for Speculative Space: Betti at Central Saint Martins, 5 March 2020 (photo by Jerneja Rebernak)

The pandemic forces us to put our future-crafting strategies on hold.

Our Speculative Space event is cancelled. Indefinitely postponed. All our energies and resources (both institutional and individual) are diverted to emergency remote teaching. The entire world enters suspended animation. The lesson cannot be more ruthless. No, the future cannot be predicted. Yes, future-proofing is an oxymoron.

There is a certain irony (which doesn’t escape us) in an endeavour like the Future Philosophical Pills being disrupted by an unanticipated global event. A twist of fate perhaps. What matters, though, is that it both humbled and spurred us in renewing our work around futures. If it is true that how we think about the future cannot protect us from the pure contingency of its manifestations, what it can do is to amplify the range of intellectual, imaginative, anticipatory, pragmatic means at our disposal to craft appropriate, enriching, and most of all nimble responses.

Figure 2. Students workshop Central Saint Martins, 6 March 2020 (photo by James Bryant)

Like everyone hit by the pandemic, our team had to adapt, rethink and reorganize. Deadlines were being pushed forward to accommodate sudden and unrelenting demands on our time and resources, both professional and personal.

As an educator involved in teaching large international cohorts of product design students at Central Saint Martins, I quickly realised the huge difference between emergency remote teaching and the complexity of the demands of remote learning, remote collaboration, and remote community building. Writing this reflection in January 2021, if there is one thing that the past ten months have made abundantly clear it is that teaching and learning online is not and cannot be simply a matter of uploading the same content only to a different medium/platform. We are dealing with an entirely different landscape that requires rethinking methods, fine tuning our modus operandi, conventions around temporalities and scale, even the rationale behind the initiatives we are hosting, and certainly the modes of engagement we put forward and expect from the participants (students, learners, peers).

When Speculative Space finally happened in October 2020 not only was the world a rather different place; our shared expectations of what an academic gathering with a focus on building a pedagogical experience had also morphed to adjust to the new normal. What is more, the palpable lack of control evidenced by the pandemic had the effect of unhinging those notions of the future as a somewhat ‘chartable’ landscape. Suddenly one of the key drives of our project – how to use uncertainty as a material to work with, and deploy the unknown as an opportunity to create meaning – became a goal (or at least a buzzword) shared world-wide. Thus, Speculative Space shifted from being the intellectually on-trend title of an academic future-oriented event; it became the emblematic qualifier of a new present. What emerged was the realisation that a radical rethinking of pedagogical instruments, epistemological methods, and ontological underpinnings of the ‘future’ itself was needed.

Speculative Space was hosted as an entirely remote event over two days in October 2020. This meant drastic adjustments to the planned structure, content and format. Our team used a combination of digital platforms to deliver it: MS Teams (with different channels for each working group), Miro boards (for collaborative workshop activities) and Simmer (hosting a prototype of the interactive Future Philosophical Pills). In fact, the whole event may be described as a prototype of sort, as none of us had ever hosted, produced and implemented a multiplatform event of this kind. Undeniably, there were technical challenges and the learning curve was steep. Still, the event managed to mobilize the content we had planned, and engage participants in working their way through the deck of cards, debating the intersection of futures with some of the key concepts proposed by the cards, and furnishing us with feedback for iteration.

Figure 3. Speculative Space on MS Teams, Europe, 6 October 2020

Since then, between October 2020 and January 2021, I have hosted several more Future Philosophical Pills workshops in a wide range of contexts, and scale: embedded as tailored course material for Product and Industrial Design undergraduate students; as part of the Politecnico di Milano-hosted Thinkathon for doctoral students; as brainstorming/speed-dating activity to kickstart the collaborative Hybrid Futures Hackathon part of the Digital Innovation Season at Central Saint Martins; as prompting/reflective tool for the postgraduate and PhD students at Tokyo Institute of Technology enrolled in my course Hybrid Futures: Designing for Uncertainty, Designing for the Post-Anthropocene. In particular, within the highly transdisciplinary context offered by Tokyo Institute of Technology the Future Philosophical Pills participate to the ongoing research around hybrid methodologies, across art and design and science and technology, bringing together practical philosophy, the critique of technology and ‘future-crafting’[1].

The salient characteristic of this approach concerns working at the hinge of the speculative and the pragmatic to develop intellectual interrogations that can scaffold tangible design-led interventions, which in turn are able to feed back onto speculation. It is important to stress this point: the speculative and the pragmatic are not opposed to each other. Pragmatic doesn’t mean practical as opposed to speculative or theoretical. Here I draw on what philosopher Brian Massumi calls speculative pragmatism[2]: how we stay open to invention and future making (speculative) while staying close to what is happening, the how, the method (pragmatism). The ‘how’ is crucial. It means that philosophy in action is in the business of activating ideas through prototyping techniques that engage with what does not exist yet; that turn uncertainty into modes of knowing; that use uncertainty as an opportunity to create meaning. This is an approach that is not afraid to embrace the unknown, and that boldly asks us to generate multiple routes of “figuring out”. It is precisely this capacity that has been thrown into stark relief in the course of this project in 2020. Not only did it turn Speculative Space into a (unexpected) meta-project. It made us alert, more than ever, to the fact that our instruments of knowledge-production are not just reflecting the contingency of the world, they are that very contingency.

[1] Betti Marenko (2020) Future-Crafting: The Non-humanity of Planetary Computation, or How to Live with Digital Uncertainty. In Susanne Witzgall et al. (eds) Hybrid Ecologies. University of Chicago Press / Diaphanes, pp. 216-227

[2] Brian Massumi (2011) Semblance and event. Activist philosophy and the occurrent arts. Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press