Methodological Playground

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      Speculating is based on imagination, the ability to literally imagine other worlds and alternatives. If we are interested in shifting design’s focus from designing for how the world is now to designing for how things could be-we will need to turn to speculative culture and what lumbomir Dolezel has called an “experimental laboratory of the world –constructing enterprise.”

      As lubmir Dolezel writes in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, “ our actual world is surrounded by an infinity of other possible world.” Parallel Universe

In capital societies that everything is controlled specially people’s mind, do you agree with the fact that our imaginations are controlled as well. Can we still have a pure/ unique imagination that is not under affect of capitalism? If our imaginations are controlled would the speculation and imagining of other worlds and alternatives still make sense? 

What is the source of imagination? Is it a single-rooted phenomena or comes from our uniqueness?  

·        The ones (fictional worlds) we are most interested in are not just for entertainment but for reflection, critique, provocation, and inspiration. We start with laws, ethics, political systems, social beliefs, values, fears, and hopes, and how these can be translated into material expressions, embodied in material culture, becoming little bits of another world that function as synecdoches.

Can the critique of capitalism itself create numbness in people (people won’t do anything about it) since we are also bombarded by the critiques as well? We already accepted that we are not able to change the system but the only thing we can do is to criticize it.   

·       To Zygmunt Bauman captures the value of utopian thinking perfectly: “ to measure the life “as it is” by a life as it should be ( that is, a life imagined to be different from the life “ as it is” by a life as it should be ( that is, a life imagined to be different from the life known, and particularly a life that is better and would be preferable to the life known) is a defining, constitutive feature of humanity.? 

Would the idea of utopia make people always look for happiness and a better life in the future rather than appreciation of life in the moment? 

Can dystopia stories and movies work as a system of control to make our mind ready for all those dystopian experiences, which has been planed?