Prototyping Futures

Catalog description

As science and technology continue to impact our real lives in positive and negative ways, prototypes can offer a window for exploring potential futures. Explores how science fiction and other approaches to prototyping can be used as a tool for helping imagine a variety of different, more sustainable futures. Students learn to use science fiction as a tool for prototyping potential futures. Draws on short stories, comics and novels to explore the questions that emerging technologies pose about issues like waste, food access, biotechnology and climate destruction. Students work together to practice developing narrative and material prototypes of different futures. Finally, students develop their own prototype exploring the ways that communities, organizations and businesses have used prototypes to create immersive experiences that help people explore and reflect on the meaning and implications of potential futures.