Topics in Design are courses taught by faculty on topics related to their research and expertise.
Design Futures: Work, Play & XR was a collaborative redefinition of the future of work, focusing on creativity, cognition and decolonization led by Professor Bolor Amgalan. The course leveraged extended reality (XR) technologies (e.g. augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality) as both a tool and a creative medium ideal for storytelling, systems design and activism. No prior XR experience was required.
Through case studies, students defined productive labor, play and social responsibility in a post-capitalist world. By leveraging speculation as a narrative device and a provocation, students crafted tools, experiences, and values based systems that support alternative visions. As automation, AI and XR technologies proliferate, we should be asking ourselves what, if any, forms of human knowledge and skills should be nurtured, and how this will affect the different systems – social, natural, economic, technological – that we’re part of. Readings and lectures introduced students to key design discourses with reimagining our collective future while drawing from sociology, grassroots democracy, performance art, architecture, game design, learning theories, film studies, and more.
Student Work
Created by graduate students Yihao Kong, Reid Weigner, and Aamil Amin, the group’s intervention in the concept of the Future of Work project is based on their research question, “how will our relationship with creative endeavors change when automation has taken over most jobs?” In a distant future, the group speculates how everyone must dedicate at least some part of their day to creative endeavors, no matter what their ability is, as a means of maintaining social status through creative output. While there are many ways to be creative, the group has chosen to explore musical composition.
The project allows people to interact with abstract objects in a virtual environment to create their own musical compositions. The objects have specific shapes and colors that intend to describe the sound while providing visual feedback. People can grab and throw these objects to create unique sounds as collisions triggers the sound. There are multiple environments, and it is expected that different environments may result in different outcomes. The experience blends the roles of composer and conductor and promotes improvisation and exploration.
Credits: Yihao Kong, Reid Weigner, Aamil Amin
Created for Design Futures: Work, Play & XR, Spring 2022
More Student Work
Created by graduate students Nicholas Lau and Sofia Perez.
As more and more avenues to own virtual spaces and items are created, how will it affect the value of work done in the real world? The group dissects the concept of Future or Work through analyzing the relationships between virtual property and real time work.
In this final project the group aims to foster discussion around the ethics of ownership and construction of virtual property while also bringing to attention the needs of the workers that produce them. By speaking to those potentially affected by this shift in socioeconomic powers and researching similar precedents, we will look about 10 years into the future to create a vlog of a worker’s day at Mutaverse, a fictional virtual real estate company. This short cinematic scene hopes to bring these questions of ownership and worker value to the forefront, and probe the irony and absurdity that arises when real-world monetary value is applied to property you cannot touch.
Credits: Nicholas Lau and Sofia Perez
Created for Design Futures: Work, Play & XR, Spring 2022
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