One of four scenarios that emerged from the question: How can projects combining creativity and technology become transformative experiences for our users?

Axes: Low technological innovation, radical lifestyle transformation

In “Flower Power” people are sceptical of linear technological innovation. They refuse to develop technologies to prop up unsustainable lifestyles and instead fundamentally question life under late consumer capitalism. Technologists and designers get together to reflect on the use of technology in society. The designs they create are socially engaged, developed in consultation with the communities who will use them. They subscribe to an open (re)source culture, allowing their designs to be improved and adapted by anyone who might find it appropriate to do so. One of the collectives is a motley crew of software and hardware engineers, interaction and industrial designers, media savvy superusers and even a couple of contemporary Luddites (leading their Repair Cafe). They work on clever low-tech systems, designed to help their users avoid the consumerist grind. Many of them spend time in developing countries, on projects like Info Ladies of Bangladesh. They are avid activists of Slow Science (and other slow movements) and Infrastructure Fiction, advocating a deceleration of life and “thinking about the box”. Most of them are vegetarian and lead healthy lifestyles. They're easy to spot in the crowd, taking aesthetics as seriously in their personal appearance as they do in their work. They subscribe to anarcho-dandyism, neo-romanticism and steampunk, championing a democratisation of good taste of a bygone (or parallel) era.


Related:

  • future_fabulators/flower_power.txt
  • Last modified: 2014-10-23 10:57
  • by maja