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Parsons
Speculative Social Justice
How might we create provocative scenarios and imaginative artifacts as a way to envision more just ways of inhabiting the world? This exhibition explores this question through an emphasis on methodological approaches that are reflexive and attuned to the ethics of research and participation. The projects that comprise this show understand speculative design as an embodied and performative mode of practice that is intrinsically social and deeply political. These research-based works consider how speculative and critical approaches to design can act as catalysts for imagining alternate presents and possible futures, offering a methodological response to dispossession, marginalization, precarity, and the forces that foreclose or curtail the possibility of living otherwise.
Thanks to: Zoe Banzon, Hannah Rose Fox, Ayushi Jain, Zishan Jiwani, Anna Lathrop, Anjali Nair, Sudeepti Rachakonda, Ying Tang, Theodore Wilkins, Miriam Young
Participating Students
- Anjali Nair & Hannah Rose Fox
- Anna Lathrop
- Zoe Banzon, Ying Tang, Sudeepti Rachakonda, Miriam Young and Ayushi Jain
Anjali Nair & Hannah Rose Fox
Performative Speculations
As part of the Speculative Social Justice studio, Hannah and Anjali developed an experimental participatory method to imagine alternate near-futures. Participants were invited to join a virtual gathering set in one of four fictional scenarios, which represented a particular group structure and generated varying social relationships between attendees of the call, ranging from strictly hierarchical to egalitarian. The scenarios were inspired by, but not directly connected to, the COVID-19 crisis: (a) an underground activist gathering within a highly-surveilled police state, which has restricted non-familial group gatherings, (b) a strategy convening among representatives of a co-op housing network, in a world where urban communal living is the norm, (c) a company meeting in which the boss discusses their policy on emergency pay, based on a new government mandate, and (d) a virtual picnic by an organization that uses questionable data and class privilege to persuade people to social distance as a lifestyle choice, after multiple lockdowns. Beyond the context provided in the invitations and designed artifacts that were shared before and during the call, there were no assigned roles or predetermined scripts. Participants were asked to bring in their own personal experiences and improvise in order to contribute to the group conversation in real time, based on the initial parameters that were introduced. The recordings from these experiments serve both as raw research data, which help us analyze structures that generate social participation, and reveal a form of co-designing speculative scenarios.
Please visit the in-progress website to view details of each scenario, props used during the live sessions, and clips from the virtual meetings. Attachment media depict one of the four scenarios.
The Housing All Under the Sun (HAUS) Coalition, originally established in Tenyr XXXZ, is a network of communal housing complexes. Made of four compounds, endearingly known as HAUSes, we operate in the urbanized regions of the permeable landmass called Central Country. Further material pulled from the collective archive of the HAUSes can be found here.
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Journey through the Tenyrs
Timeline showing the progression of the urban HAUS movement
The Four HAUSes of the Coalition
Naming Ceremony
A rite of passage ceremony that can occur several times over life, which allows people to share their chosen identifier.
Re-Power! Diagram
From Bod Haus' classic guide to reimagining power and personhood in collective societies
Vaid Haus District Map
Permeable Borders of Central Country
Anjali Nair & Hannah Rose Fox
Performative Speculations
As part of the Speculative Social Justice studio, Hannah and Anjali developed an experimental participatory method to imagine alternate near-futures. Participants were invited to join a virtual gathering set in one of four fictional scenarios, which represented a particular group structure and generated varying social relationships between attendees of the call, ranging from strictly hierarchical to egalitarian. The scenarios were inspired by, but not directly connected to, the COVID-19 crisis: (a) an underground activist gathering within a highly-surveilled police state, which has restricted non-familial group gatherings, (b) a strategy convening among representatives of a co-op housing network, in a world where urban communal living is the norm, (c) a company meeting in which the boss discusses their policy on emergency pay, based on a new government mandate, and (d) a virtual picnic by an organization that uses questionable data and class privilege to persuade people to social distance as a lifestyle choice, after multiple lockdowns. Beyond the context provided in the invitations and designed artifacts that were shared before and during the call, there were no assigned roles or predetermined scripts. Participants were asked to bring in their own personal experiences and improvise in order to contribute to the group conversation in real time, based on the initial parameters that were introduced. The recordings from these experiments serve both as raw research data, which help us analyze structures that generate social participation, and reveal a form of co-designing speculative scenarios.
Please visit the in-progress website to view details of each scenario, props used during the live sessions, and clips from the virtual meetings. Attachment media depict one of the four scenarios.
The Housing All Under the Sun (HAUS) Coalition, originally established in Tenyr XXXZ, is a network of communal housing complexes. Made of four compounds, endearingly known as HAUSes, we operate in the urbanized regions of the permeable landmass called Central Country. Further material pulled from the collective archive of the HAUSes can be found here.
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Anna Lathrop
Anna Lathrop (she/hers) is a design researcher and facilitator based in Lenape territory (Brooklyn, NY). Her work is situated at the intersection of Human-Centered Design research and social justice. Recent projects include a month-long project with TONYC's Rapid Response Troupe exploring the role of speculative design in imagining and actualizing just futures. She has a background in directing and producing for theatres in Washington, DC and New York City. She is the former Executive Director of The Muse Project in New York City, and the co-founder of the Washington DC Coalition for Theatre & Social Justice. Additionally, she has a strong visual design practice that supports her work as she explores different methods synthesizing and presenting research. All of her work is done through a justice lens that celebrates the legacies of the advocates, artists, and elders who have paved the way ahead. She is currently an MFA Candidate in the Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons School of Design, an Impact Entrepreneurship Cohort Fellow, and a recipient of the John L. Tishman Scholarship.
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Rehearsal Process
These are a collage of images from our rehearsal process over the course of April 2020. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to do everything over Google Hangout. This also meant that each individual was responsible for creating their own tools instead of designed templates.
Cover
At the end of the process, I asked everyone how they'd like the work to be shared. We agreed on a digital collage, which I then also created in a printable format as a zine so the work can also be shared physically. I was able to compile our poems, speculative legislation, scenes, illustrations, and process transcripts in one interactive space.
Futures Wheel and Poems
As part of our exploration into both TO techniques and speculative design, we used a variety of tools to imagine our futures. Here is one of the poems and one of the futures wheels that were created in the course of our rehearsals.
Stage
I wanted the zine to be interactive to try and capture some of the embodiment that is so integral to Theatre of the Oppressed work. I illustrated a picture based on some of the visual descriptions of the future world we were creating, and then also created a space in the zine for two characters that can be cut out and played with.
JESS and ALICE figures
These are the two characters, JESS and ALICE, once they've been cut out of the zine. These characters allow participants to act out the scenes written in the zine, as well as embody any interventions they wish to take to change the story.
Poem and Transcription
At the end of our process, I asked everyone if the ways they thought about the future had changed because of our rehearsals. The answers were a definite yes.
Anna Lathrop
Anna Lathrop (she/hers) is a design researcher and facilitator based in Lenape territory (Brooklyn, NY). Her work is situated at the intersection of Human-Centered Design research and social justice. Recent projects include a month-long project with TONYC's Rapid Response Troupe exploring the role of speculative design in imagining and actualizing just futures. She has a background in directing and producing for theatres in Washington, DC and New York City. She is the former Executive Director of The Muse Project in New York City, and the co-founder of the Washington DC Coalition for Theatre & Social Justice. Additionally, she has a strong visual design practice that supports her work as she explores different methods synthesizing and presenting research. All of her work is done through a justice lens that celebrates the legacies of the advocates, artists, and elders who have paved the way ahead. She is currently an MFA Candidate in the Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons School of Design, an Impact Entrepreneurship Cohort Fellow, and a recipient of the John L. Tishman Scholarship.
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Zoe Banzon, Ying Tang, Sudeepti Rachakonda, Miriam Young and Ayushi Jain
The Novel Times
In the social upheaval caused by recurring pandemics, AOs (~21 years) rejected their child status and rose to power, quickly proving to be more capable leaders than the QTs (~27-70 years).
Addicted to capitalist beliefs, wars and nostalgia, ages Q to T were ill-equipped for the novel times era. Because ages H through O did not falter so quickly to the refrain of multi-viruses tickling the planet, they took on the outdoor work and the high up roles. The QTs, their time as world leaders now extinguished, took on the indoor work caring for the AGs, UXs and anyone that could not withstand the latest strains in the outside air. The BJs excelled at language-sponging and learning-soaking, their hive-hearts panoraming and floodlighting the world's knowledge-giving. The KOs were altrulicious in their smartening and functiontating, challenging the sneaky checklists of the QTs. The As and Zs reverberated, emanated, and braided the future-past. To coordinate such tangles and osmose their multi-facts in micro-fashions, the BOs created The Novel Times - a wayfinding place for their informingling.
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Zoe Banzon, Ying Tang, Sudeepti Rachakonda, Miriam Young and Ayushi Jain
The Novel Times
In the social upheaval caused by recurring pandemics, AOs (~21 years) rejected their child status and rose to power, quickly proving to be more capable leaders than the QTs (~27-70 years).
Addicted to capitalist beliefs, wars and nostalgia, ages Q to T were ill-equipped for the novel times era. Because ages H through O did not falter so quickly to the refrain of multi-viruses tickling the planet, they took on the outdoor work and the high up roles. The QTs, their time as world leaders now extinguished, took on the indoor work caring for the AGs, UXs and anyone that could not withstand the latest strains in the outside air. The BJs excelled at language-sponging and learning-soaking, their hive-hearts panoraming and floodlighting the world's knowledge-giving. The KOs were altrulicious in their smartening and functiontating, challenging the sneaky checklists of the QTs. The As and Zs reverberated, emanated, and braided the future-past. To coordinate such tangles and osmose their multi-facts in micro-fashions, the BOs created The Novel Times - a wayfinding place for their informingling.
- Thumbnails