[ISEA2016] Workshop: Ian Wojtowicz — Critical Manufacturing: A Hackathon for Speculative Design

Workshop Statement 

Design fiction is a technique that employs the tools of product development to speculate about the future. It is pure marketing. It is product development without the product. It is science fiction for the present — it preempts, upturns, discusses, warns, and ultimately improves upon the present. It is a creative process that bridges production with critical inquiry and can enable new forms of mimetic public protest. Design fiction brings together new publics around current social issues by using the language of commerce and advertising, selling new worlds that cannot (or should not) currently exist. It is cultural critique embedded within the vehicles of consumerism.
By inverting the normal agenda of product design (seducing, soothing and satiating customers), design fiction provokes unsettling new questions about reality and the futures that await us.
Join us for Critical Manufacturing: A Hackathon for Speculative Design where we will employ design fiction to create projects that address issues of social justice, public space, personal agency and autonomy, and other contemporary collective issues.

Participants should have some comfort with drawing and an interest in designing products.

  • Ian Wojtowicz is an artist and researcher working in new media. His projects have exhibited internationally at venues including ISEA, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the British Computer Society, The New School, California College of the Arts and Harvard University. He graduated from MIT with a Masters in Art, Culture and Technology where he received an MIT Fellowship Award. He has contributed to projects nominated for Emmy and Webby Awards, as well as featured in Wired Magazine, a TED talk and a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. Ian was also the Founding Editor of one of the first cultural magazines published online and has taught at Emily Carr University, CA.