I did an arts!

Reading Time: 2 minutes

picture of the notes takenFor a course on Critical and Speculative Design, our first assignment was to create an a/b manifesto, following the work of Dunne and Raby.

The teachers told us to chose an area we are familiar with, passionate about, have expertise or a strong interest in.

All of these apply to University, so I decided to make the status quo my “a”, and an accessible, open University my “b” column. The content came together during a jitsi-meet with a friend who is a PhD-candidate at the HCI institute. You can see the notes in the picture – here goes the better-readable version:

 

ab
total objectivitysituatedness
“alt-ehrwürdig”accessibility
goal-orientedexplorative
built upon the work of othered peopleacknowledging the work of othered people
centralizedopen source
all sunshine since 1365/1815reflective, self-critical
constructivistdeconstructivist
autonomy (leading to [internal] conflictsolidarity
industrysociety
localde-centralized
right or wrongcontext dependent
errors mean failingerrors mean learning
neutralpolitical
westernglobal
absolutesrelative
classistopen for all
bureaucracy / red tapeaction
enlightenmentCritical Theory
abstractconcrete
cis-malegender inclusive

The fascinating thing about this is that the layout of the manifesto creates a dichotomy, although some of the terms and concepts are not mutually exclusive towards each other. Some could as well be two points along a path (A and B).

Also, this was a great experience regarding syntax and semantics: some of the terms I put with each other may seem as weird choices, no matter if they are seen as exclusive, or as points along a path. For example, the reason why “centralized” is opposed with “open source”, and “de-centralized” with “local”, is that I understand them here not in their primary, or most obvious meaning, but in one more nuanced, maybe harder to grasp.