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Infrastructures of the imagination: building new worlds in media, art, & design

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Infrastructures of the imagination: building new worlds in media, art, & design

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INFRASTRUCTURES OF THE IMAGINATION:

BUILDING NEW WORLDS IN MEDIA, ART, & DESIGN

by

Karl Baumann

______________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS)

August 2018

Copyright 2018 Karl Baumann

ii
Acknowledgements

This dissertation is a product of merging idealistic dreams with pragmatic methodological
experience. While the ultimate argument is utopic, the source is often derived from frustration in
a country – in a world – that seems to slide backwards socially whenever steps are made to
progress towards a brighter, more sustainable and equitable future. The sheer scale of issues
facing humanity today require a truly massive and collaborative effort to understand each other
and to perceive alternatives to our way of life. If only for a brief moment, I would like people to
be able to imagine – to entertain – a world that is wholly different from their own. The words that
exist throughout the rest of this text are humble attempts to outline how we can imagine and
create a new world. My conceptual umbrella of “infrastructures of the imagination” and the
participatory methodology of “anticipatory design” are my own articulations, but derive from a
vast sea of parallel and overlapping efforts that couple creative practices with social issues. This
dissertation therefore is a product of a network of practitioners and theorists, who I have drawn
inspiration from or worked with directly. It is only through their efforts that I am here today.
The process of coming to these conclusions and projects is one of collaboration and
inspiration – from loved ones, community partners, academic research labs, and interdisciplinary
friends. I first must acknowledge my wife, best friend, and life partner, Dr. Jen Menjivar-
Baumann. She has contributed to my thinking through the last 10 years through intellectual
discussions and our shared love for film, design, and Los Angeles. As an experienced
psychology professor, she has inspired me to be a better communicator and maintain the highest
standards of both ethics and aesthetics in my work. Jen has taught me deep interdisciplinary
insights and methodological honesty. She also proofread this dissertation. As my partner, we
have traveled the globe together to explore other cultures, cities, and ways of being in the world.
Our legally combined names (Menjivar-Baumann) represent the shared journey we now take with
each other.
I must also thank my parents, Paul and Dr. Gwen Baumann. My father instilled in me a
great sense of responsibility and social justice – as well as love for classic and science fiction
films. My mother’s unwavering intellectual curiosity taught me at a young age how to continue
asking questions and deconstruct the world. My parent’s acceptance and support of my
interests in the arts – especially as an accountant and a chemistry professor - set the foundation
of who and where I am today. I sincerely thank them for their guidance and hope that I can help
contribute (even in the smallest sense) to future generations in making a better world.
Professionally, I must thank Ben Caldwell, François Bar, and Benjamin Stokes, who
welcomed me as a first year PhD student to become a cofounder of the Leimert Phone Company
(LPC) with them. As I will discuss throughout this dissertation, the LPC is a university-community
design collective that has been the driving force of my dissertation work. I met Annenberg
Communications Professor François Bar and then-PhD student, Benjamin Stokes at an
Annenberg Fellowship “micro-seminar” intended to introduce students to other disciplines. The
intended affect was achieved and François, Ben, and I ended up forming a lasting six-year
relationship. Though Benjamin has been in Washington, D.C. (now an assistant Professor at
American University) during the last two years of our work, he was a guiding presence for my
introduction into the PhD experience. Professor François Bar has been inspiring in his
commitment to community engagement – often biking across the city for meetings or late-night
hip-hop events – as well as his loose and playful sense of collaboration. François and I have also
developed and co-taught classes together, reaching across institutional boundaries to provide
unique educational experiences for students. Artist and filmmaker Ben Caldwell and I have
developed a deep collaborative bond over the years. From biking to his Kaos Network Art Center
in 2012 to traveling together to Denmark, Detroit, Chicago, and Montreal, Ben and I have co-

iii
created the Sankofa City (out of the Leimert Phone Collaboration). Our shared backgrounds as
filmmakers and artists gives us an often unspoken shared agreement to push formal and social
boundaries in our work. At 40 years my senior, Caldwell has a deep relationship to - or direct
leadership in – the history of south LA hip-hop, experimental film, and community organizing.
His accomplishments are unprecedented and I am humbled to be a part of his historical
trajectory.
During my first year at USC, I also met many of my university research lab collaborators
and committee members. Andreas Kratky, my dissertation chair, inspired me with his work
Bleeding Through. In 2012, we worked together on my locative media experience Memory
Cellars. Kratky’s interdisciplinary understanding of both art and science helps to maintain an
emphasis on repeatable methodologies alongside poetic provocation. My other cinematic art
committee members, Henry Jenkins and Tara McPherson also inspired me through their keen
intellectual insights and deep theoretical experience. Henry Jenkin’s concept of the “civic
imagination” and my work with his Media Activism and Participatory Politics (MAPP) group was
essential for my understanding of using fictional worlds for real-world intervention. Tara
McPherson and her leadership in the Polymathic Institute, in which I was a research fellow,
pushed my boundaries to truly explore outside disciplines and aim for holistic scholarship.
Though not part of my dissertation committee, Professor DJ Johnson was also important to my
thinking, as I was his teaching assistant and curriculum collaborator for two years for a class on
“gender, race, class, and technology”.
Now, on the verge of starting an industry job as a senior interaction designer, I must also
acknowledge the experience of working in Scott Fisher’s Mobile and Environmental Media Lab
(MEML) and Alex McDowell’s World Building Media Lab (WBML). While at MEML, I worked on a
range of design scenarios with industry partners, including BMW and Steelcase. In the process,
I developed a deeper understanding of “design thinking” and how to work with clients. I started
at USC at the same time that production designer Alex McDowell joined the USC faculty. My
experience in his world building lab taught me to balance top-down systems thinking with
bottom-up character-driven design. Partnering with Intel, 20
th
Century Fox, and Technicolor, his
lab taught me how to work with large industries to tackle big-picture issues and develop new
paradigms for the future.
Though I studied in the school of cinematic arts, my central focus has always been on
the urban experience. I was born in Princeton, New Jersey and would often visit the crowded
streets and skyscrapers of New York City. But after being raised in the swamps of Georgia and
the rural-suburbs of Cincinnati, I always felt a longing for the city. I came to Los Angeles with a
dream of living in a major metropolis and found a uniquely American global city. Upon moving
here, I met a number of UCLA urban planning students and their friends. They had recently
started organizing a series of “urban spelunk” tours around Los Angeles, which included walking
into places like the LA river to give speeches and read poems about the city (with the occasional
bar crawl along the way). These experiences were my introduction into the urban form and social
fabric of Los Angeles. Since then, the continuing conversations and collaborations with those
UCLA students - including Taylor Fitz-Gibbons, Gary Benjamin, Erika Thi Benjamin, Lila Burgos,
and more – have greatly matured my understanding of urban planning and exposed me to a rich
array of urban literature. Despite our collegiate rivalry between UCLA and USC, I have always
felt at home with these friends and colleagues.
Amongst my own USC colleagues, the names are innumerable and I hope to capture a
glimpse of all the people that inspired, contributed, or collaborated in this process. Joshua
McVeigh-Schultz has been a friend and guide for me, finishing his MFA at UC Santa Cruz the
year before me and then entering the USC MA+P program two years before I did. We’ve both
come from similar disciplinary backgrounds and have always run parallel academic careers. Jen

iv
Stein was a recent graduate of MA+P when I started and helped to guide my initial experience
through the program while working together in the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab. Laura
Cechanowicz has been a close collaborator and friend throughout my time at USC. Behnaz
Farahi has been a friend and inspiration for her innovation and aesthetic beauty. Gabriel Peters-
Lazaro has always been a guiding MA+P student, and I enjoyed collaborating with him and
Sangita Shresthova. Lena Uszkoreit, who was a part of our early Leimert Phone Co
collaborations, has stayed a good friend and academic co-patriot. Other PhD students include
Emilia Yang, Amanda Tasse, Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Micha Cárdenas, Jeanne Jo, George
Carstocea, Samantha Gorman, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Samantha Close, Raffi Sarkissian,
Geoffrey Long, George Villanueva, and Nonny de la Peña. I have also met amazing film and
interactive media collaborators in the cinema school including, Avimaan Vivek Syam, Scott
Stephan, Julian Kantor, Ascot Smith, Paisley Smith, Brian Zhang, Patrick Meegan, Brandon
Cahoon, Ginge Cox, Heika Burnison, David Aristizabal, Timothy Offor, Mario Rodriguez, Abbie
Alvarez, and Malika Prisarojn. Some of the USC film students and I have created lasting
relationships, worked together on multiple projects. Alejandro Martinez or Will Jobe have worked
as director of photography on all of my major projects since 2014. James Craft, a composer I
met in 2013, has worked on every film and video project I have created since that time. I would
also likely to deeply thank the USC professors who have guided me through classes,
collaborations, and discussions, including Holly Willis, Steve Anderson, Richard LeMarchand,
Robeson Taj Frazier, Jose Sanchez, Jeff Watson, Tracy Fullerton, Michael Fink, Jed
Dannenbaum, Norman Hollyn, Bruce Block, and Candace Reckinger.
I would like to sincerely thank and acknowledge all of the participants and collaborators,
both from USC and the Leimert Park community, who have worked with me over the last six
years with the Leimert Phone Company and the Sankofa City dissertation project. janet e.
dandridge has been a part of the collaboration since the beginning, and has been influential in
running workshops and using her skills of improvisation. Andrew Schrock, from the USC
communications department, has been vital in computer programming and engineering our
devices. Patrice Fisher has from the beginning been an inspiration and glowing presence in our
work. Wesley Groves helped build the original payphone and is always ready to jump into a
workshop or help with any engineering issues. Rudy “Rude” Martinez was a significant member
of the first group and was the driving force in conceptualizing and fabricating the final phone.
Wo’se Kofi was a big initial influence, who starred in many of our first videos and provided much
of the music. Leila Dee Dougan was part of the initial university group and collaborated with me
on multiple projects - including a KCET video about the World Stage center. Other early
participants include (but are not limited to) Meryl Alper, Substance, Uhura, Marie Sullivan, and
Minkah Smith. Jefferey Winston has also been a helpful and enlightening local contact, who has
deep historical and personal connections to Leimert Park.
I would like to thank the team that worked on “Sankofa Says”, the big urban history game,
we created for Indiecade. That team includes Nicholas Busalacchi, Alex Leavitt, Aaron Ashby,
and Michael Chang. Nick and I also worked together on a class around world building in DTLA.
All of the students in my and François Bar’s IML 404 class were also influential in creating new
urban furniture designs and applying for the pedestrian plaza in Leimert Park, including Gabriel
Peters-Lazaro, Mark Pitts, Elizabeth Raff, David Kim, Eric Camarena Martinez, Katharine
Weimer, Alison Wotton, Kylie Nicholson, Althea Capra, Matthew Chen, Edward Saavedra, and
more. I would like to particularly thank the team behind the “beat bench” which has been
embraced by the city as a potential design for future interactive urban benches. That team
includes Tim Huang, Charmain Asril Lee, Chris Swiatek, and Emily Molina.
For the actual dissertation project, Sankofa City, there was a big network of collaborators
both for the workshop series and then the subsequent film and VR project. Retro Poblano has

v
been highly dedicated to the project and has changed the way I view autonomous vehicles.
Rashan Cummings was a very dedicated participant and collaborator. Matthew J. Miller was a
participant and an urban planning PhD who has evolved my understanding of both planning as
well as the black radical imagination. The community-driven workshops developed great
concepts and projects thanks to Noelle Brimble, Darol Olu Kae, Oonagh McDowell, Briana
Spencer, Watson Hartsoe, Magalis Martinez, Wesley Groves, Patrice Fisher, Ishan Shapiro,
Emilia Yang, Henry Jenkins, Luciana Fer, Oliver Gray, Elizabeth Caldwell, Osahon Tongo, Sabelo
Mzizi, Cameron Williamson-Martin, Kim Maxwell, and more. The initial pitch video was created
by Katherine Sweetman. Both the final film and VR film were produced Andrew Vasquez who was
a tremendous help. O’Shea Myles has also helped throughout both productions and was always
a blessing to have on set. The Sankofa City film was funded by the USC Annenberg Fellowship
Fund. The film stars Denise Yolén and Sydatris Thompson, along with live performances by Olivia
“Just Liv” Walker and the S.H.I.N.E. Mawusi drum group. The film VFX and modeling was by
Joshua Masters and Stephan Park. The upcoming VR film is funded by the Jaunt VR Lab under
the supervision of Candace Reckinger and Mike Patterson. Shaoyu Su has been the driving force
on the ground as director of photographer and VFX consultant, along with David Beier. The
spatialized audio is done by Barry Nelly and VFX by Yimin Zhang and Billy Pence. The cast
included featured music performances by Victor “X Man” Taylor, Olivia “Just Liv” Walker, Gerald
“The Mayor” McCauley, ALIEN, Nzingha Camara, and the S.H.I.N.E. Muwasi group. Thank you
again to all of the people that have put in time, creativity, and insights into our collaborative
projects, have been important and influential in my dissertation process. If utopia is an imagined
place, it is the product of our practices. The Sankofa City project exists in our collective
imagination and we are therefore the citizens and inhabitants of that imagined future.
When I was a 22-year-old senior at the Ohio State University, I had a ten-year plan. I
determined that I would go to USC and get a PhD from the Media Arts + Practice; but the
program seemed too new and I was too young. So I planned on getting a masters and then
working before applying to the program. I made that plan in 2008. Now 10-years later, I have
finished that plan. After getting an MFA in Digital Art New Media from UC Santa Cruz, I taught
video and helped to run an afterschool program with the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula in
East Palo Alto – before applying to Media Arts + Practice program. I must thank the many
professors who inspired me intellectually, ethically, and methodologically along my route. At
Ohio State, I would like to thank J Ronald Green, John Davidson, Abril Trigo, Laura Podalsky,
Raquel Pina, Dave Filippi, and Brian Hauser. At UC Santa Cruz, I would like to thank Sharon
Daniel, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Irene Gustafson, Jennifer Gonzalez, Soraya Murray, and Michael
Mateas.
Now in 2018, I am elated to be graduating from USC and completing my 10-year plan. I
will be moving on to (an unexpected and unplanned) industry job in Silicon Valley. This PhD has
changed my life and the way I view the world, often reminding me how little I know - and in turn
- how much I need to learn. I hope I can continue to build upon the theories and projects that
make up this dissertation. While my new job will be in a very different context, I will still be
creating future-facing designs that seek to tackle multi-dimensional challenges of the urban
environment. I am not sure exactly what my next 10-year plan is, but I know I will dedicate the
rest of my life to work with others and develop plans for a better future. Another world is possible,
and I cannot wait to see what we come up with.

vi
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………………..……. ii

Introduction: Infrastructures of the imagination …………………..…………………………….…… 1
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………..…….…… 1

A. Current Landscape: Visions of Dystopia and Utopia ……………………………….….. 4
B. Defining the Three Dimensions of Infrastructures of the Imagination …………….….. 7
C. Detailed Chapter Breakdown: From Envisioning to Building …………………….….. 10
D. Anticipatory Design …….…………………………………………………………….…... 17
E. Next Steps ……………………………………………………………………………….... 21

Chapter 1: Envisioning Futures: Speculative Futures in Design, Film, and Games ……………. 30
Tale of Two Cities …………………………………………………………………………..… 30
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………… 31

I: Science Fiction by Another Name ………………………………………………………... 33
A. Design Fiction ……………………………………………………….………..….. 33
B. Speculative and Critical Design ……………………………………………..….. 38
C. World Building and Science Fiction Excess ……………………………….….. 43
II. Past Filmic Visions of a City’s Future …………………………………………………….. 48
A. Blade Runner ……………………………………………………………………... 49
B. Her ……………………………..………………………………………………….. 56
III. Playing as a City …………………………………………………………………………… 63
A. Procedural Rhetoric of an Urban Body…………………………………….…... 64
B. Scaling up to SimCity’s Emergent Systems ………………………………...... 66
C. Speculative Sustainability in Block’hood ……………………………………… 69
III. Virtually Living in the Future ……………………………………………………………… 73
Conclusion ………………………..…………………………………………………………… 77

Chapter 2: Building Spaces: Urbanism, Mobile Technologies, and Tactical Media …………… 86
Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………..….. 86
The Second Dimension of Infrastructures of the Imagination …………………………… 88

I. Urban Spaces: Top-down Utopias Versus Everyday Space ………………………….. 90
A. Modernist Dreams: Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhass ………………………... 90
B. Modernist Realities: Los Angeles and the Car ………………………………... 93
C. The Production of Space and Everyday Life………………………………….... 96
D. Dominated Versus Appropriated Space………………………………………. 100
II. New Urban Spaces: Tactical Interventions and Spectacles ………………………… 102
A. Everyday Urbanism and New Urbanism ……………………………………..... 102
B. Biking Spectacles for a New City …………………………………………….... 108
C. Ride South LA and Healthy Food Map ……………………………………..….. 111
III. Hybrid Spaces: Mobile and Environmental Technologies ….………………….…… 114
A. Mobile Interfaces and the Body ………………………………..……………... 117

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B. Mobile Histories and Polyvocal Traces …………………..………………….... 122
C. Mobile Stories in Institutions: Livingverse and Memory Cellars …………….. 124
IV. Hybrid Play: Mobile and Urban Games ………………………………………………... 130
A. Playing with Others: Locative Media and Urban Games …………………..... 130
B. Locative Game for Urban History: Sankofa Says ………………………….…. 133
V. Hybrid Politics: Tactical Interventions and Prefigurative Occupations .………….… 137
A. Tactical Media …………………………………………………………………… 137
B. Another World is Possible: Occupy Everything …………………………....… 144
Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………….... 152

Chapter 3: Forming Communities: Publics, Community Art, and Participatory Design …...… 164
Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………….. 164
The Third Dimension of Infrastructures of the Imagination …..………………………… 167

I. From Aesthetic Objects to Democratic Processes …………………………………..… 169
A. Aesthetics in Community Art and Social Design ………………………….… 169
B. Democracy, Participation, and Community ……………………………....…. 172
C. Counterpublics, Inoperative Communities, and Agonism ………….…….… 176
II. Art and Participation History ……………………………………………………….….... 180
A. 1920-1950s: Modernist Aesthetics and Assumptions …………………...… 180
B. 1960s: Participation and Anti-Aesthetics ………………………………….… 181
C. 1980s-1990s: Place, Community, and Identity …………………………...… 183
III. Complicating Participatory Art Forms ……………………………………………….… 186
A. Debates around Institutionalizing Community Art ………………………….... 186
B. Place and Pedagogy: Molecular rather than Cultural representation …....… 191
IV. Participatory Design History ………………………………………………………….… 193
A. 1970-1980s: Participatory Design foundations: In the Workplace ……....… 194
B. 2000s: Participatory Design today: Everyone is an “End User”…………...… 196
V. Participatory Design Strategies ……………………………………………………….… 200
A. Infrastructuring - Building Time and Space ………………………………....… 200
B. Malmö Living Lab: Scandinavian Social Networks and Novel Designs ...… 202
C. Participatory Chinatown ……………………………………………………...… 207
VI. The Leimert Phone Company ………………………………………………………..… 209
A. Matters of Concern and Backstory ………………………………………….… 210
B. Infrastructuring and Fluid Groups …………………………………………....… 213
C. Phase 1 – Designing Payphones …………………………………………….… 216
D. Phase 2 - Designing a Constellation of Urban Objects …………………...… 220
VII. The Leimert Phone Company: Interdisciplinary Strategies ……………………....… 223
A. Design Fiction Videos in Both Phases ……………………………………....… 223
B. Tactical Urbanism and Reshaping the Streets ……………………………..… 226
C. Phase 3: Complications of a Gallery Setting ……………………………….… 229
D. The Leimert Phone Company Reflections ………………………………….… 231
Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………...…. 233

Chapter 4: Building the Future: Utopia, Anticipatory Design, and Sankofa City ………….…… 245
Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………..… 245

viii
I. Theories of Utopian Praxis ……………………………………………………………..… 246
A. Searching for Utopia: Thomas More to Ernst Bloch ……………………....… 246
B. Utopic Cultural Surplus ……………………………………………………….… 250
C. Towards an Anticipatory Design ……………………………………………..… 252
II. Science Fiction Utopias and Imaginative Activism ………………………………....… 255
A. Science Fiction Futures with a History of Techno-Utopia ………………….. 257
B. Sam Delany and Critical Sci-Fi Utopias / Heterotopias …………………...... 259
C. Afrofuturism and Activism: Octavia Butler and Emergent Strategies …..…. 264
D. Civic Imagination and World Building ……………………………………...…. 270
III. Sankofa City - Community-Based Anticipatory Design …………………………...… 274
A. Hybrid Methods for Urban Futures ………………………………………….… 274
B. Anticipatory Design and Infrastructures of the Imagination ………………... 277
C. Trajectory from Project Backstory……………………………………………... 282
D. The Anticipatory Design Process …………………………………………...…. 286
1. Speculative “What if” Questions ……………………………….….. 288
2. Initial Outcomes, Issues and linking Culture to Technology ........ 290
3. Building and Scaling Designs …................................................... 292
4. Entry Points into the Future ....................................................….. 294
5. Final Video and Public Presentation ........................................…. 295
E. Dissertation Project Discussion ...............................................................…. 298
F. Follow up Projects and Ongoing Prototyping Efforts …............................... 299
Conclusion ………………….......................................................................................... 303

Conclusion: Infrastructures of the Imagination ...................................................................…. 313
A. Why Utopia Matters ...........................................................................................… 313
B. Infrastructures of the Imagination and Anticipatory Design ..............................…. 316
1. Envisioning the Future .............................................................................… 317
2. Building Spaces and Prototyping the Future ...........................................… 318
3. Forming Communities and Collaborative Infrastructures ........................… 319
C. Spreading Anticipatory Design ............................................................................… 320
D. Towards a Brighter Future ..................................................................................…. 326

ix

List of Figures

Figure 1: The infrastructures of the imagination feedback loop …………………………….…….. 8

Figure 2: The three dimensions of infrastructures of the imagination ……………………………. 9

Figure 3: Sankofa City dissertation project group concept example …………………..…...….... 16

Figure 4: World Building design process graph ……………………………………………………. 45

Figure 5: Stills of the crowded streets of Blade Runner (1982) …………………………………... 51

Figure 6: Stills of driving in Blade Runner (1982) …………………………………………......……. 53

Figure 7: Blade Runner (1982) architecture ………………………………………………...…...….. 54

Figure 8: Still of LA subway map in Her (2014) ………………………………………………....….. 58

Figure 9: Still of subway ride in Her (2014) ……………………………………………………….…. 60

Figure 10: Still of public space of Her (2014) …………………………………………………...….. 61

Figure 11: Stills from city simulator Block’hood (2016) …………………………………….…..…. 70

Figure 12: Le Corbusier’s design for the Radiant City ……….……………………………………. 91

Figure 13: LADOT parklets and pedestrian plazas …………………………………………….…. 107

Figure 14: Memory Cellars mobile story ……….…………..…………………………………….... 127

Figure 15: Liemert Phone Company team ……………………………………………………...…. 134

Figure 16: Sankofa Says urban game …………………………………………………………….... 136

Figure 17: Occupy Oakland …………………………………………………………………………. 145

Figure 18: John Ahearn’s The South Bronx Bronzes (1988) …………………………………….. 184

Figure 19: Leimert Phone Company workshops …………………………………………………. 215

Figure 20: Urban furniture design fiction videos ………………………………………………..... 225

Figure 21: LADOT People St Plaza in Leimert Park …………………………………………....… 228

Figure 22: The Futures Cone ……………………………………………………………………….. 284

Figure 23: Group concept for autonomous shuttles …………………………………………...… 285

x

Figure 24: Group concept for wearable technology …..…………………………………….....… 292

Figure 25. Group workshop processes .……………………………………………………..….…. 293

Figure 26: Group concept for community garden …………………………………………..….… 295

Figure 27: Stills from final design fiction video ………………………………………...….… 296-297

1
Infrastructures of the Imagination:
Building New Worlds in Media, Arts, and Design

Introduction

Another world is possible, she is on her way.
- Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014)

Another world is possible, but how do we get there? How do we turn utopic futures, radical
changes, and science fiction visions into reality? And more importantly - how do we empower
everyday people to create those visions and changes?

This central question within this dissertation asks how we can both imaginatively and
practically build another world, another future? Infrastructures of the imagination means using
our collective imagination to design new cities that are sustainable, pluralistic, and democratic.
It also means building better infrastructures for everyday citizens to collaboratively participate in
the process of envisioning, designing, testing, and implementing the future. By working directly
with everyday citizens and urban residents, designers not only gain novel ideas but also
develop a diversity of conceptual models for development. As the failures of past urban
designs and utopian plans reveals (McCullough, 2004; Chase, 1999; Jacobs, 1961), the
process of developing new modes and forms of living cannot happen from the top-down but
rather must emerge through diverse bottom-up practices that build upon the past.
Bottom-up does not have to mean temporary. The phrase “another world is possible”
appeared in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s as an inspiring political mantra of the radical Left
(Mertes & Bello, 2004). But in form, “another world” is often manifested as temporary protests
and tactical interventions. How do we build more long-term and sustainable systems for the

2
future - both in terms of concrete designs as well as the social relationships that go into
producing such designs? Creating long-term relations and empowering everyday citizens
provide a space for developing wide-scale and future facing plans for “another world”. By
marrying storytelling and design, we can invite public participation and incite the imagination,
while giving concrete forms and solutions. These are not exhaustive, end-all modernist
solutions, but holistic and provocative solutions to ever-increasingly complex and
multidimensional “wicked problems” (Buchanan, 1992) that face humanity. Such solutions will
not derive purely from experts, but must incorporate a wider pool of participants outside the
halls of professional industry and academia. By working with the public, a co-design process
can challenge professional assumptions and incorporate alternative belief systems.
This dissertation will lay out an interdisciplinary theory and history of media arts,
technologies, and urban designs related to the collaborative creation of alternative futures,
utopic impulses, and political interventions. The analysis will showcase a spectrum of forms,
from time-based media (film, games, and VR) to place-based designs (mobile media,
community art, and urbanism), in order to reveal a range of complementary and overlapping
strategies. In addition to historical examples, I will weave in my own ongoing community-driven
speculative design projects in order to ground the more theoretical discussions and provide
pragmatic methodologies and lessons learned. I have worked in South Los Angeles, in the
historic African-American music and arts neighborhood of Leimert Park, for the last six years to
facilitate teams of community members and university students to create speculative urban
designs tied to local culture.
This work began as the Leimert Phone Company, a design collaborative founded by
myself, USC professor François Bar, American University professor Benjamin Stokes and our
community partner, filmmaker/artist Ben Caldwell. Over the years, the collective evolved to
incorporate a wide range of participants and collaborators, most notably community-based

3
artists janet e. dandridge, Patrice Fisher, Rudy “Rude” Martinez, and Wesley Groves, along
with civic technologist Andrew Schrock. We began by redesigning old payphones into
communication hubs (Stokes, Bar, Baumann, & Caldwell, 2014) and cultural sentinels that tell
local stories and play local music. Then we created a “constellation” of urban objects
(Baumann, Stokes, Bar, & Caldwell, 2016), such as bus benches, newspaper boxes, planter
boxes, and public display cases. The constellations were the basis of a proposal to the city to
successfully transform a street into a pedestrian-only plaza.
In late 2016, Ben Caldwell and I launched the Sankofa City project (Baumann, Caldwell,
Bar, & Stokes, 2018; Baumann, Stokes, Bar, & Caldwell, 2017) to imagine the future of the
neighborhood around urban-based technologies, like self-driving vehicles and augmented
reality (AR). AR and self-driving vehicles are among a number of encroaching technologies that
are set to “disrupt” our way of life – particularly in terms of how we navigate and experience
the urban environment. By focusing on emerging “disruptive” technologies, we sought to
empower local community members and artists to design these technologies in line with their
social rituals, cultural beliefs, and aesthetic principles. The final output of the Sankofa City
project was a series of design prototypes and a short design fiction film that represented our
future visions and provoked public discussion. Our process weds the aesthetics of speculative
design with the ethical considerations of participatory design. In order to create inspiring
models of the future, our methods of participation must be equally diverse as our images and
designs. Our motto is, “Shoot for the stars. Build for the streets.” The designs were utopian
and visionary, but grounded in the rich history of the neighborhood and addressing real world
issues that plague our present world. While attempting to address larger issues of sustainability
and gentrification, the process visualized collective aspirations for future neighborhood
development.

4
A. Current Landscape: Visions of Dystopia and Utopia

Following the results of the 2016 US election, the Trump presidential administration has
promised to “Make America Great Again” (a phrase borrowed from Ronald Reagan’s 1980
presidential race [Graham, 2018]) by looking to an imagined past, rather than a progressive
future. As I will discuss in Chapter 3: Forming Communities, French philosopher Jean-Luc
Nancy (1991) argues that such nostalgic claims to the past are often dangerous foundations for
nationalism and ethnocentrism. Indeed, rather than work with the global community, the Trump
administration has alienated allies through trade disputes (Palmer, 2018; Schoen, 2018) and
sought aggressive measures against immigration (Guild, 2018; Misra, 2018) and travel visas
(Yasin, 2018). Instead of tackling climate change, the administration has denied its very
existence (Associated Press, 2018) and reversed regulations (Davenport & Tabuchi, 2018) in an
attempt to champion fossil fuels (Neslen, 2018).
The hubris of the administration belies the larger collective sense of impending climate
disaster, fueled by decades of films (Kraus, 2017) such as the Mad Max series (1979, 1981,
1985, & 2015), Waterworld (1995), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Snowpiercer (2013),
Interstellar (2014), Geostorm (2017), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Furthermore, the role of
reality television (Wells et al., 2016) and social media misinformation (Allcot & Gentzkow, 2017)
in Trump’s rise to the presidency mirrors the dystopian satires of the Black Mirror television
series (2011-2017), Running Man (1987), and Idiocracy (2006). The contrast between the
increasing awareness of large-scale global issues and our individual powerlessness gives little
hope for a shared optimistic vision of the future. Dystopian fictions are indeed powerful tools
for critiquing reality, but they do not offer many solutions. Coalition building and hope amongst
the central characters usually emerge as happy endings in these stories, but the overall
systematic context often remains unchanged. It is no wonder then that Young Adult (YA) series

5
such as The Hunger Games (2012-2015), and Maze Runner (2014, 2015, & 2018) have become
so popular. At least in these fictional series (both based on books), the central characters are
able to resist and overthrow their oppressive social systems. Yet the characters’ fiercely fought
victories are through combat, and do not present systematic designs and infrastructures for
overcoming disasters and creating a better quality of life. When dystopia is so easily imagined
or reinforced, how do we create alternatives? How do individuals develop agency to change
the world when it has become so vastly complex and unmanageable?
Utopianism failed in the mid 20th century because it was tied to modernist models of
universalism and top-down endeavors (McCullough, 2004; Chase, 1999; Jacobs, 1961). Poorly
designed housing projects and cities without sidewalks were the results of utopic ideals of
efficiency that envisioned humans as pieces in a perfectly running machine rather than as
individual agents. If we build utopia today, we must balance between bottom-up and top-down
design practices that include and incorporate human-centric approaches and community co-
design. Various recent movements have developed within design, architecture, and media
making that use different terminology but overlap in the general utopic impulse of creating
aspirational alternatives to our future world. These concepts and methodologies include
“speculative design” (Dunne & Raby, 2013), “design fiction” (Dourish & Bell, 2014; Bleecker,
2009; Sterling, 2009), “future crafting” (Ratti & Claudel, 2016), “critical making” (Ratto, 2011),
“civic imagination” (Jenkins, Shresthova, Gamber-Thompson, & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2016),
“imaginactivism” (Haran, 2017), “emergent strategies” (brown, 2017), and “world building”
(Pendleton-Jullian & Brown, 2018).
Speculative designers Dunne and Raby (2013) refer to the idea of micro-utopias to
accommodate and perpetuate individual desires and ideals. But micro-utopias run the risk of
repeating the logic of neoliberalism and individualism. Is there an alternative for utopia that is
large-scale but also supports difference and plurality? Maybe utopia as a singular place isn’t

6
the right concept; as Fredric Jameson (2005) explains, utopias often imply a closed-system.
That is why utopian imaginations are usually isolated enclaves or islands (as in Thomas More’s
original 1516 book). The work of philosopher Ernst Bloch (1954) has been recently re-utilized
by theorists and activists to advocate for thinking of utopia as an open-ended praxis, rather
than some distant place. This implies that rather than creating one perfectly running closed-
system, we should work towards an open-ended infrastructure for multiple intermingling and
interoperative systems. Ideally, we can create an infrastructure that is constrained enough to
foster desired activities and practices, but also open enough to engender innovation and
appropriation.
Infrastructures of the Imagination is an attempt to theorize as well as test how
community co-design can create utopian, future facing designs and built environments. Like a
feedback loop, the built environment is a manifestation of past dreams and desires that
constrain and engender the production of future dreams and desires. As Lefebvre highlighted
in his Production of Space (1991), no new or revolutionary society can exist without producing
its own space. We inherit past social hierarchies and civic activities from those who designed
our cities before us.
Apple, Uber, and the culture of Silicon Valley present us their own dreams of the future,
driven by efficiency and elegant design. Some theorists (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006; Barbrook &
Cameron, 1996) have coined such tendencies as part of the “California Ideology”, which is at
once socially liberal while also reinforcing neoliberal models of free trade and individualism that
undermine state and union protections. While our new mobile technologies allow us to produce
new forms of space, often flexible and individualized, the underlying politics are not innocent
and come with ideology baked into both the hardware and software. Is Silicon Valley’s new
world truly radical or just radically accelerating the effects of global capitalism? And does this
world begin from top-down company decisions or bottom-up citizen and consumer practices?

7
Indeed, taxi unions are failing because they failed to understand how the world has
changed with new technology. Their model of reality was out of touch with contemporary
consumer practices (Stone, 2014). The smartphone has changed the way individuals interface
with their environment and navigate the city. As “disruptive” technologies are unmaking and
remaking the world, we have to create, test, and intervene with our alternatives. It is no longer
enough to protest pre-existing models - as neoliberal capitalism has become the global norm –
we must present alternatives and test them in the real world.
We are born into the master’s house and so we live - often unconsciously - by those
rules. The power of co-designing the built environment is to denaturalize this seemingly static
and unchanging system. Through small interventions and grand envisioning, citizens can alter
their surroundings to make a better world. And in learning from past failures, we can attempt to
make those alterations flexible enough to accommodate future generations, in our long road to
human progress and self-fulfillment.

B. Defining the three dimensions of Infrastructures of the Imagination

In the following four chapters, I will outline a range of concepts and projects that work
towards a more concretized, holistic model for building aspirational futures and developing a
nascent “anticipatory design” methodology. Anticipatory design in the simplest terms
combines the provocative future facing design work of world building and speculative design
with the human-driven methods and ethics of participatory design and community art.
Mirroring the design process itself, the first chapter will begin with images and stories before
moving into spatialized and urban forms. The fourth chapter then will build upon the historical
examples and projects that represent each dimension in order to articulate “anticipatory

8
design”. The final chapter will also analyze my own dissertation work that draws from these
past projects.
Infrastructures of the Imagination is the larger conceptual term for breaking down
processes that either (a) imagine and create new built environments and techno-systems or (b)
develop methods and spaces for increasing public participation in creative, political, and
designerly processes. While Chapters 1-3 explore past case studies, methods, and theories
that often lie on one side of the feedback loop (Figure 1) or the other, I ultimately aim to create
a “anticipatory design” methodology that incorporates both sides (Chapter 4).
Figure 1: The infrastructures of the imagination feedback loop between creating structures for
democratic participation and creating complex technological systems and urban designs.

Infrastructures of the imagination is not about imagination in a pure whimsical sense,
but is rooted in real-world issues and wicked problems, problems such as gentrification,
affordability, homelessness, and sustainability. These problems are multifaceted and require a
diverse collaboration across disciplines, generations, cultures, and ethnicities. By working in
conjunction, we are able to bring unique insights and expertise that complement one another
and create a more holistic solution. These solutions should be long-term, flexible and
incorporate the human elements of desire and decency - rather than just efficiency.

9
Figure 2: The three conceptual and methodological dimensions of infrastructures of the imagination.

Infrastructures of the imagination has three dimensions (Figure 2) that include (a)
envisioning futures (b) building spaces and (c) forming communities. Though the chapters will
be laid out in this order, these are not meant to be read as a linear progression, but rather
indicative of the more complicated dimensions of infrastructures of the imagination. As the
figure below shows, the envisioning process is the first point of transforming the world but
gains spatiality through building and forming communities. The process of actually
implementing designs in physical, public space (Chapter 2) or creating democratic participation
and collaboration across communities (Chapter 3) are much more complicated socially and
legally than creating arts and designs that envision the future. Nevertheless, envisioning the
future, both in imaginative brainstorming and aesthetic communication are central to the
process of developing another world.

10
C. Detailed Chapter Breakdown: From Envisioning to Building

Chapter 1: Envisioning Futures: Speculative Futures in Design, Film, and Games begins
with a theoretical and methodological analysis of “speculative design”, “world building”, and
“design fiction”. World Building comes from mediamaking - films and games - while
speculative design and design fiction come from industrial design. Yet, the latter two also draw
heavily from mediamaking and storytelling, particularly design fiction. World building and
speculative design both draw from a process of asking “what-if” questions to spark debate
and design. These questions create constraints and guides that then spiral out to generate
novel forms and concepts across multiple domains (transportation, culture, law, etc.).
World building began in fiction, with authors ranging from Lewis Carroll to J.R.R.
Tolkien and Octavia Butler creating detailed and interlinking cultures, forms, and people for the
written page. More recently, world building has developed as a transmedia methodology,
associated with designer Alex McDowell. His method started in the production design of film
sets and evolved into a massive process of holistically mapping the social, urban, and
ecological makeup of fictional worlds. In this sense then, world building shows how the built
environment - and not just the characters - provide rich narrative information. As I will layout in
Chapter 1’s subsequent media analysis, the role of the built environment becomes increasingly
important as media moves from film to games and Virtual Reality (VR), increasing system
complexity and human scale environmental interaction. Throughout this chapter, and the
overall dissertaton, I will explore the question of how best to balance between high-level
systematic understanding and bottom-up human-centric scales. In the media analysis section
of Chapter 1, we will look at competing representations of Los Angeles’s future in Blade
Runner (1982) vs. Her (2013). I will also look at the role of interactivity and learning urban
systems in SimCity (Maxis, 2012; Maxis, 1999) vs. Block’hood (Plethora Project, 2016). While

11
SimCity is an ever evolving representation of our contemporary urban planning, Block’hood is a
new game that provides speculative forms and alternative value systems for planning. Lastly, I
will analyze VR systems and the possibility of creating virtual environments for embodied
prototyping of potential design objects and spaces. Drawing from a recent report I co-wrote for
Google, I will also briefly discuss VR’s capabilities for inhabiting non-human elements in order
to learn about and empathize with natural ecological systems.
Chapter 2: Building Spaces: Urbanism, Mobile Technologies, and Tactical Media
focuses on artistic and architectural plans and interventions in the built environment. Here we
shift away from stories, simulations, and single objects to public spaces and urbanism. As
designs move into the complex socio-technological assemblage of the city, more
unpredictable variables and multiple possible configurations of publics emerge. Modernism
championed the utopian form as something achievable through top-down master plans by
geniuses, often to find utter failures once inhabited by real people.
In the wake of modernism - both in urban design and the arts - there has been an
increasing emphasis on temporary and bottom up interventions. New forms such as “everyday
urbanism” and “tactical urbanism” have developed to either (a) scaffold designs upon pre-
existing local structures and communities activities and/or (b) create temporary structures that
intervene in the city to test alternative urban forms and solutions. Interestingly, some tactical
urbanism techniques have also been implemented from the top-down, with events like Ciclovía
in Bogota (and CicLAvia in Los Angeles) where the city shuts down streets for a day to create
pedestrian and bike only sections.
Within art and media practices there has emerged a field of “Tactical Media” (Raley,
2009) in which media art, interactive systems, and performances are used for small-scale and
temporary interventions. Like tactical urbanism, the emphasis is on providing audiences and
citizens a momentary glimpse into another possible world. These experiences in turn inspire

12
them to expand their imagination and create actions to move towards that potential. Both
“tactical” forms of media and urbanism then provide real physical experiences for citizens and
audiences to participate in and test out - creating what Stephen Duncombe (2007) calls
“ethical spectacles”. Duncombe’s writing was a provocation for the Left in the US to
incorporate more desires, dreams, and spectacles into their politics in order to have a greater
impact on the public. He saw the Left as relying overtly on facts, logic, and policing of
behavior, rather than fueling the collective desires of the public. In the end, I analyze the ways
in which the 2011 Occupy protests presented ethical spectacles for prototyping new
experiences of urban space and democratic participation.
Chapter 3: Forming Communities: Publics, Community Art and Participatory Design
develops further concepts and theories around working with publics and communities in
artistic endeavors and designs around urban environments. This chapter begins with a
theoretical discussion of democracy, community, and participation looking at evolving
discussion from John Dewey to Jürgen Habermas to Chantal Mouffe and Jean-Luc Nancy.
While Dewey originally conceived of multiple conflicting and overlapping publics, Habermas
conceived of a unifying consensus-model achieved through rational deliberation. Now,
contemporary philosophers such as Chantal Mouffe argue for an “agonistic” model of
democracy which embraces dissenting voices in attempt to promote pluralistic participation.
Then, I will explore how these theories and other ongoing issues lead to the increasing
popularity of community art and participatory design. Exploring contentious notions of
community and participation, I will look at a number of projects and case studies that both help
to illuminate the potential successes and failures of the developing methods within art and
design. Community art and its variant titles, “dialogical art”, “socially engaged art”, “relational
art”, etc. developed since the 1960s as part of a radical questioning of individual authorship
and a desire for utopic communal action. In the mid 90s to early 2000s, participation became

13
increasingly central in art discourse as artists tried to reconcile their role within a problematic
global capitalist system. Much like tactical media, these artists emphasize ephemerality in
order to eschew objecthood and commodification. Claire Bishop (2012) argues however, that
as a result of the emphasis on community, there has been too much value placed on the
process of collaboration (ethics) rather than the quality of the work (aesthetics). As I argue in
Chapter 1, the role of aesthetics are vital for communicating concepts and inspiring new ideas,
both as a form of pleasure for the audience as well as an excess of meaning that inspires new
associations.
Participatory design was developed initially within Nordic countries in the 1970-80s as a
way of democratizing the workplace, by incorporating workers into the design of their spaces
and systems. The methodology has since spread to other countries as well as other
communities, including immigrants, the elderly, and youth. In each instance, the co-design
process is meant to empower “users” by giving them insights into and creative license to
change the design of systems that affect their daily lives. The concept of “infrastructuring”
(Karasti, 2014; Karasti & Syrjänen, 2004) has become particularly powerful in planning long-
term projects and implementations, not just for the final designs but also the social formation
of future collaborations.
Lastly, I will discuss the Leimert Phone Company (LPC) participatory design project.
Since we began the LPC in 2012, our projects have sought to empower local community
members to see their built environment as malleable rather than static. We began with
repurposing payphones to do a range of functions: tell local stories, play local music, and
spark explorations to local institutions and business. From there, we have collaboratively
created a historical urban game, a constellation of urban objects (bus benches, newspaper
boxes, etc.), a pedestrian plaza, and speculative visions of AR-enabled autonomous vehicles. (I
will discuss the speculative Sankofa City project in more detail in the following Chapter 4.)

14
This section of Chapter 3 will also break down the ongoing issues that face Leimert
Park (and other South Los Angeles communities) and its historical context. The neighborhood
was started as a planned “whites-only” neighborhood before housing covenants were lifted in
1948 (Exum & Guiza-Leimert, 2012) and the area became a hub for African American music
and arts by the late 1960s. Now with a subway line opening in 2020, property values are
increasing and there is a deep fear within the community of gentrification and cultural
displacement. The Leimert Phone Company was birthed out of these issues and concerns.
Gentrification is a “wicked problem” affecting many urban areas in the US and around the
world. Our designs are stratagems for reinforcing local cultural activity and creating new
relationships with outsiders to the neighborhood. Each new project builds off the last and
creates an infrastructure for future-facing projects and new community formations.
Chapter 4: Building the Future: Utopia, Anticipatory Design, and Sankofa City will return
to utopia, science fiction, and activism before concluding with a detailed case study analysis of
my dissertation project Sankofa City. This chapter will expand upon the discussion started in
this introduction by analyzing the ways in which Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope defines utopia
as a hopeful, open-ended practice, rather than a closed, far away society as More originally
conceived of it. Stephen Duncombe’s revisiting of Moore’s writing and reconceptualizing of an
“open utopia” (in the introduction to More, 2012) will also help link together various discussions
on the role of democratic participation. In this chapter I define and expand upon my own
design method of “anticipatory design”, which I will discuss shortly.
Furthermore, this chapter will analyze the ways in which radical science fiction and
Afrofuturism alter the definitions of utopia, by analyzing Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton: An
Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993). These
representations differ from past techno-utopias, which are conceived as hyper-rational and
efficient societies managed from the top-down. In Delany’s novel, he shows a society with little

15
governance, that is driven by collective searches for pleasure and desire. While in Butler’s
novel, the protagonists must navigate a dystopic, drought-ridden society in order to build
community and utopic future possibilities.
Parable of the Sower is particularly powerful for its inspiration on real-world activism.
Drawing from Butler’s book, adrienne maree brown in Detroit has developed urban gardening
programs and literacy programs for ex-convict and low-income community members. brown’s
work builds community capacity, pushes their imagination, and creates physical forms for
dealing with sustainability, possible ecological disasters, and de-urbanization. Similarly, other
activists have used the writing of Ursula Le Guin to imagine anarchist and gender fluid political
organizing. Activism doesn’t always have to derive from explicitly radical political writings.
Henry Jenkins and his research team have documented how activists across the world have
reclaimed mass media and popular culture storyworlds to inspire change. His group has also
formalized a community world building method for doing their own “civic imagination” work.
After laying out this theoretical impetus, the chapter will analyze the Sankofa City
project, looking at the methodological process, lessons learned, and final outcomes. The
project is an ambitious attempt to work with community members to create visions and
prototypes for their desired future. By focusing on emerging technologies and yet-to-exist
technologies, the project offers creative freedom for participants to imagine alternative
directions for the development (Figure 3) of their urban area. Unlike the payphones and bus
bench designs, these technologies don’t have a pre-established form, which makes them both
more conceptually slippery as well as more rich in potentialities.

16

Figure 3: Sankofa City group concept for autonomous shuttles, pedestrian zones, and inter-community
drones for trading locally grown produce.

Drawing from the methodologies of speculative design and world building, the project
begins with provocative “what if” questions to create conceptual constraints and trigger the
imagination of the participants. These “what if” questions were created to address local
community issues and included:

1. Autonomous Vehicles: What if self-driving shuttles replaced privately owned vehicles?
2. City as Instrument: What if the city could be played like a musical instrument?
3. Gardening Community: What if the city was built around community gardening/farming?
4. No Private Property: What if there was no private property and no policing?

While these issues are tied to local concerns, such as traffic, cultural heritage, healthy
food, sustainability, policing, and affordable housing, they also speak to larger problems that

17
plague communities across the world. We can’t generalize solutions on a global scale, but
each local project can act as a testing site of methodologies and concepts to be repeated
elsewhere. Throughout this dissertation, I will emphasize the importance of scaling-up to long
term strategies. To borrow a term from video game production, each project is a “vertical slice”
(Game Development Workflow, 2016) of the whole possible system. The vertical slice gives
you a sample of the core mechanics and aesthetics of a game to test, before going to final
production. Moreover, during the testing of a vertical slice, game designers often witness
“emergent” or unexpected behaviors by playtesters. For the Sankofa City project, we can track
participant responses and concepts to map out both the successes of the methodology as well
as the emergent conceptual designs and plans.
In the end, the project creates a feedback loop in which community designs lead to
larger community discussions which changes the collective imagination of the neighborhood’s
future. As with all of our projects, groups presented design concepts, including collages of
design prototypes and a final video, to a local stakeholders and community planning meeting
to gain feedback. The community response was highly positive and the video has been shown
at a number of other meetings and venues - most recently the Pan African Film Festival. While
the project was well received, more work needs to be done in order to create immersive,
modular, and interactive prototypes for public engagement and prototyping. As I am writing
this dissertation, we are working on a virtual reality prototype to overcome the “experiential
gulf” (Candy & Dunagan, 2017) between our concepts and our prototypes.

D. Anticipatory Design

Anticipatory design is my own nascent design methodology developed through my
dissertation work. Anticipatory design focuses on empowering our ability to make large scale,

18
systematic changes in the world for the better of humanity as a whole. The name draws from
Buckminster Fuller’s (2008) “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science” and Ernst Bloch’s
(1986) notion of “anticipatory consciousness”. Bloch defines anticipatory consciousness as the
ability to see utopic potential in the present and develop new insights for the future.
Buckminster Fuller’s Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science method was an attempt to
create holistic designs that tackled large scale systemic issues related to ecology and energy.
Fuller’s definition was an attempt to find fractal elements that exist across natural and social
systems in order to create designs that rippled out and changed the world. My definition differs
from Fuller, however, in moving away from single solutions to a diversity of strategies and
collaborative experimentation. As I will argue throughout this dissertation, the complicated
nature of sociocultural existence makes single solutions nearly impossible. Or to put it another
way, systematic and scientific solutions must be negotiated and explored through a range of
smaller scale collaborations with a diverse range of populations. Especially when thinking on a
global scale, we must be highly critical of any totalizing model. Fuller is right in identifying the
earth as one ecological system, but it is full of many interdependent components whose
unique complexity cannot be taken lightly.
Therefore anticipatory design is a future-facing design strategy that explores the
contours of preferable futures through social collaboration and experimentation. Drawing from
world-building and speculative design, which use “what if” questions to provoke and explore
the cascading implications of new technologies and social conditions across disciplines and
social milieus. Anticipatory design seeks large scale and interdisciplinary collaboration to
actively create objects, stories, and media that give form to utopic impulses. By giving form to
shared dreams, others can experience, test, and build upon anticipatory designs in an additive
and long-term strategy for building a better future.
How can community-based speculative design help to retain cultural values and social

19
practices while planning for future urban computing systems and interfaces? Anticipatory
design seeks to empower local populations to engage with emerging urban-based
technologies (such as self-driving cars and augmented reality) in their own cultural terms and
design potential implementations. As I will attempt to map throughout this dissertation, there is
a productive feedback loop between speculative, imaginative, and utopic thinking/storytelling
with real world community organizing and technological/urban design (Figure 1). Again, the
overall concept of infrastructures of the imagination refers to both how we build our world
based on our imaginations of the future as well as how we create infrastructures for people to
participate in that act of imagining. Anticipatory design is a methodology for consciously
combining these interrelated strands to take seriously critical utopic world building alongside
community participation and planning. Anticipatory design seeks to grapple with large scale
wicked problems by empowering individual citizens to participate and transform their
surroundings. Like speculative design and world building, anticipatory design also addresses
the power of presenting provocative aesthetic objects to engage with and inspire others
outside the production process. Anticipatory design is inspired by a wide range of disciplines
and methods, such as participatory design, everyday urbanism, community art, tactical
urbanism, and speculative design. These domains will be explored throughout the following
chapters. The key to the conceptualization of anticipatory design include:

1.) Long-term relations: The anticipatory design method seeks to move beyond
individual workshop series and initiatives to create lasting social relationships. My method
takes seriously the notion of infrastructuring, building upon social networks and aiming to
maintain an open framework for future collaboration. Over time, disparate communities and
disciplines begin to form common ground of shared values, knowledge, and goals.

20
2.) Maximal participation: As a form of prefigurative politics, this design method
experiments with radical democratic participation throughout the entire process - from
envisioning to building. It is not enough for designers and artists to simply act as a translator or
representative, but to empower participants to express themselves in both concepts and
aesthetic production.

3.) Utopian politics: In order to overcome current limitations of our social reality, this
method embraces utopian thinking and a collective striving for a better world. However, utopia
is not a closed system nor some distant place. Rather it is a praxis, an attention to the latent
utopia possibilities within our current world. By using imaginative processes, designers and
participants alike can push beyond their current framework to envision a truly radical and
equitable future. Utopia is plural and open to diverse overlapping possible worlds.

4.) Aesthetics to inspire publics: Aesthetic and sublime forms offer audiences a rich,
multisensory experience that can have a deeper impact than abstract proposals. In order to
move beyond the realm of experts, popular forms like science fiction film, urban games, and
public art can offer an entry point into more complex concepts and formal designs.
Additionally, aesthetics are central for representing disparate cultural groups and their
particular worldviews.

5.) Balancing systems and people: Balancing human-centric design with large-scale
systems is the most challenging - but necessary - part of the anticipatory design process. Past
urban failures often resulted from a systems perspective that discounted individual experience.
However, current radical political, artistic, and urban interventions are often short-lived and do
not achieve their intended social transformation. Bottom-up practices need to continue to build

21
networks and establish spaces that change dominant society, especially considering the scale
of current global challenges to environmental and economic justice. In concert with building
long-term relationships, design initiatives will benefit by partnering with ongoing social
organizing and advocacy groups that are working towards real-world policy changes that
parallel the more speculative and imaginative work of critical utopian design.

E. Next Steps

This dissertation is not exhaustive but instead maps out the multiple interdisciplinary
practices and theories that go into imagining, prototyping, and building the future through
democratic processes with diverse populations. Our work is open-ended and evolving, and will
surely change over the years to come. I hope these case studies and theories will help provide
a robust example for thinking about big, global issues through small, local projects. Throughout
the dissertation, I focus mainly on cities because they seem to be the best sites for
experimenting and prototyping the futures of civilizations. Cities are messy, complicated
design systems with massive infrastructures and diverse populations that represent larger
global economic trends and conflict-driven diasporas. I do not mean to discount rural and
agricultural populations but find it best to speak from a place of personal experience and my
own on-the-ground work in South Los Angeles. Along the journey, I will discuss global theories
and project examples but will conclude with my own project and the lessons learned there.
That being said, my proposed “anticipatory design” process is a method that can be tested
just about anywhere; but it must be implemented through attention to the particularities of your
community, through long-term relationship building and collaborative discussions. In the end, I

22
hope this method has learned from the mistakes of the past in order to incrementally and
imaginatively build a better future.

23

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Chapter 1: Envisioning Futures:
Speculative Futures in Design, Film, and Games

The Tale of Two Cities

Halfway through Her (2014), we see Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix)
looking longingly out the window of a subway car. It is magic hour and the orange sun rays
dance upon Theodore’s face as he passes through the downtown skyscrapers of future Los
Angeles. The train window reveals the AT&T radio tower, near Pershing Square park. The
scene seems blissful but mundane. Its power is in its subtlety. Because in reality, there is no
above ground rail that snakes through the skyscrapers of downtown.
Throughout the film, Spike Jonze uses simple film tricks to show the pleasures of a
possible pedestrian-friendly future Los Angeles. The city’s iconic car-centric urbanism
becomes redesigned through extensive rails that can take you from the beach to the
mountains. In contrast, the future Los Angeles in Blade Runner (1982) speaks in grand gestures
and dystopic spectacles. The vibrant street life is claustrophobic and Deckard (played by
Harrison Ford) is only really at peace when he is in a flying car soaring above the city,
recapitulating the original promises of the freeway. His omniscient perspective echoes the
dreams and assumptions of modernist master planners.
Her rather shows a bottom-up portrayal, that emphasizes the human scale and a city
built on social activity rather than massive architectural forms. This is the tension in envisioning
the future. How do you create systems without fetishizing order? How do audiences learn,
identify with, and find pleasure in imagined design worlds? By looking at the evolution of
representational media and interactive design, we can begin to map out the theories, tactics,
and strategies for empowering collective imaginations of the future.

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Introduction

In order to create a better future, one must first envision it. One must envision not just
the technological systems but also the human element - the pleasures, pains, desires and
rewards that accompany any socio-technical transformation. Without a representation of the
humanness, it is difficult for audiences to see themselves in the future and make meaning of
the emotional value, social rituals or kinesthetic logic of projected futures. In order to
understand the process of envisioning the future, let us first establish a critical language
around representation and design, based on the current media-rich landscape of future facing
designs and speculative story worlds. By analyzing popular media, I seek to deconstruct
models of the future that are within the collective imagination. I will also contextualize these
projects within a constellation of contemporary future-facing design strategies, such as
speculative design, design fiction, and world building. In conclusion, I will look to the
possibilities of virtual reality (VR) and emerging practices that push our media representations
towards interaction, immersion, and "storyliving". Audiences can now participate in
storyworlds rather than reading and consuming stories told to them.
Science fiction has developed as a storytelling genre to explore the moral and
existential complexities of possible future trajectories, ranging from outright utopian
technophilia (the Star Trek television series [1966-1969] or Tomorrowland [2015]) to dystopian
enslavement by technological beings (Metropolis [1927], The Terminator [1984], and The Matrix
[1999]). In recent years, the genre has become incorporated into a number of professional
design practices as well, most notably design fiction and speculative design. Design fiction in
particular has become of a form of soft science fiction filmmaking, utilizing videos and “diegetic
objects” in order to present scenarios for possible human-centric technologies of the future.

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Within the realm of mediamaking, design has also taken on an increasingly powerful
role. World building has developed as a form of transmedia production that moves production
design to a central creative position within the development of new narrative worlds. As video
games eclipse films in overall sales (Nath, 2016), their role is no longer to simply translate the
film’s scenes into pixelated interactions. Rather games add a unique dimension, driven by the
design of systems and the underlying logic of a fictional world. The player’s process of
problem solving and working through systems cause another level of participatory
understanding that moves beyond watching a film. Values and meaning become directly
encoded into the game rules and learned through repeated play. As I will explore in later
sections, games like Sim City have a procedural model for how a city functions and how best
to develop it.
With the current re-introduction of virtual reality headsets and environments, we see
another opportunity to wed narrative worlds and interactive systems with the experience of the
human body. Virtual environments allow audiences to use all of their sensorimotor perception,
increasing the depth of embodied learning and offering more profound opportunities for
empathy. As our media moves towards complete immersion and interactivity, audiences get
closer to actually stepping inside possible future worlds and testing them out for themselves.
Mediamaking and design thus play a powerful role in the collective construction of
imagined futures. Moreover, interactive environments provide ample testing ground for learning
causal relationships within the larger systems that surround the individual body. By mapping
the representational strategies and technical affordances, I will outline the unique and
overlapping potentials for media and design towards envisioning future worlds and societies.
Section I will outline the methodological and theoretical impulses behind design fiction,
speculative design, future crafting, and world building. Section II will look at the ways in which
science fiction films Blade Runner (1982) and Her (2014) construct future visions of Los

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Angeles. Section III is focused on game systems, comparing SimCity (2014, 1992) to the
speculative indie city builder Block’hood (2016). Then Section IV will analyze recent virtual
projects and the potential for fully immersive environments for envisioning the future or
analyzing complex systems.

I: Science Fiction by Another Name

A. Design Fiction

Sci-Fi as popular entertainment focuses on whiz-bang more than usability - However,
when science fiction thinking opens itself to design thinking, larger problems appear.
These have to do with speculative culture generally, the way that our society imagines
itself through its forward-looking disciplines. Many problems I once considered strictly
literary are better understood as interaction-design issues.
-Bruce Sterling, “Design Fiction” (2009, p. 20)

Following Sterling’s call for better design in science fiction, a number of designers,
most notably Julian Bleecker, Paul Dourish, and Genevieve Bell, sparked a new
methodological trend called “design fiction”. As Dourish and Bell claim in “Resistance is Futile”
(2014), science fiction offers technology a more holistic context for imagining designs and their
implementations. Science fiction creates alternative possible worlds and lifestyles, ripe with
new modes of being and new rituals. The best science fiction worlds also scale their context to
think both about the individual uses of technology as well as state, legal, and corporate
apparatuses that structure society. Dourish and Bell claim that by exploring alternative worlds

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we can uncover assumptions about our own. As they put it, “we can reflect upon underlying,
and often implicit, assumptions that constrain our thinking...any description of a technology is
always already social and cultural” (Dourish & Bell, 2014, p. 781). The designer gains a greater
insight by experimenting with the social and cultural dimensions that frame a technological
device and its usage.
On the reverse side, design offers science fiction the possibility to concretize its
imagined worlds into physical artifacts. If technology is already social, its design expresses
something meaningful about that society through a tangible and interactive object. As Bleecker
explains, “design fiction objects are totems through which a larger story can be told, or
imagined or expressed. They are like artifacts from someplace else, telling stories about other
worlds” (Bleecker, 2009, 7). Design is a way of materializing the imagination and working
towards possible alternative communities and their practices, all the while testing new
interaction rituals and finding faults and affordances.
Bleecker references film theorist David A. Kirby’s (2010) concept of the “diegetic
prototype”, in which, “the prototype enlivens the narrative, moving the story forward while at
the same time subtly working through the details of itself” (as cited in Bleecker, 2009, p. 39).
Diegesis is a term from literary and media studies that refers to something within the
storyworld. The diegetic prototype then uses the power of storytelling to give context as well
as a narrative structure for making meaning of the technology. As Bleecker goes on to explain,
the diegetic prototype also allows for a more pragmatic process in terms of materials and
distribution. In terms of materials, the diegetic prototype is fictional and thus can work out
issues through physical dramatization rather than constant construction. For distribution, he
claims that science fiction as compared to science-fact “almost certainly circulates knowledge
and ideas more effectively than all the science journals and science journalism in the world”
(Bleecker, 2009, 39). So in addition to the more poetic and provocative effects, design fiction

35
and diegetic prototyping offer practical solutions for construction and collective conversations
about the future of design.
Dourish and Bell also claim that science fiction does not merely anticipate but actively
shapes technological futures through its effect on the collective imagination (Dourish & Bell
2014)

(something return to with Henry Jenkin’s concept of the “civic imagination” in Chapter 4).
Star Trek has often been lauded at inspiring young scientists (BBC News, 2016) and their future
inventions (NASA, 2016; Hsieh, 2014). The role of science fiction imagination and storytelling is
to work out the contours of new socio-technological paradigms, such as the internet of things
(IoT), mixed reality, and ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), which are bringing computing deeper
into the physical world. Mixed reality is a hybrid reality of digital models combined with the
physical world. Mixed reality is often generally used as an umbrella term that includes virtual
reality, in which users are immersed in headsets to view 360 video or computationally
generated environments, and augmented reality, in which computational information or models
are overlaid onto reality through phones, glasses, or contact lens. Ubiquitous computing and
the internet of things refers to how everyday objects and environments will be embedded with
computational technology that allows them to communicate to each other and user’s devices –
making them “smarter” and more responsive. These technologies are more embedded into
everyday life and public spaces, and therefore have far-ranging social implications. As Dourish
and Bell claim, the issue with much of the current ubicomp design work is that it assumes a
“universal user” and thus erases difference and assumes a post-racial society (Dourish & Bell,
2014, p. 780). This is particularly dangerous when computing incorporates the social and urban
environment. In creating new technological paradigms, cultural assumptions become hidden
and assumed under the emphasis on design. Science fiction allows ongoing social issues and
questions, like inequality and difference, to become re-inserted into how we imagine the
technological future through a form of human-centric design.

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What makes design fiction distinct from science fiction is not just the emphasis on the
design objects, but how they work in everyday life or the “future mundane”. As Chris Elsden et
al. (2017) explain, “Bleecker’s Near Future Laboratory aims to represent an ‘everyday’ future
avoiding fantastical sci-fi, techno-utopia or dystopia” (p. 5392). Design fiction is about
contextualizing design objects to give them relevance in everyday scenarios and probabilities.
The designs become realistic because they’re perceived as being a probable extension of our
own world or society. The oft-cited quote is Bruce Sterling’s claim that design fiction is “the
deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief in change” (Lindley & Coulton, 2015,
p. 210). Drawing from narrative theories of “suspending disbelief”, audiences project
themselves into design fiction storyworlds and imagine what that technology might look like. In
Dunne and Raby’s (2013) conceptualization of Speculative Design (which I will investigate more
thoroughly in the next section) the designers argue for using defamiliarization and Brechtian
alienation
1
to draw attention to their designs’ construction rather than suspend disbelief. So
what makes Design Fiction distinct is its use of familiar narrative tropes and coherent
storyworlds to communicate design concepts and provoke the audience imagination.
Tanenbaum, Pufal, and Tanenbaum (2016) claim that, “the thing that sets design fiction
apart from these allied practices is that it explicitly concerns itself with diegesis” (p. 10). So
Tanenbaum reinforces Sterling’s conceptualization of emphasizing the narrative, the fictional
storyworld in order to create meaning around the object. Coulton, Lindley, Sturdee, and Stead
(2017) contend that it is not the “story” that is important but rather the “world” that gives
meaning to these designs. In their article “Design Fiction as World Building”, they argue that
design fictions do not have to be stories, but rather objects that provide multiple “entry points”
into an imagined world (In Section I C, I will discuss World Building in greater depth). They

1
A technique by German playwright Bertolt Brecht used in his plays to repeatedly reference or draw attention to
their constructed and fictional nature.

37
point to Bleecker’s “Ikea Catalogue from the Future”, as well as their own design documents
that use fictional magazines, mockups, blueprints etc. to suspend disbelief and create realistic
artefacts from an imagined future. For Coulton, Lindley, Sturdee, and Stead (2017), the point is
not to tell a story but create a diegetic object that makes an argument and sparks discussion.
They claim that design fiction functions as a form of rhetoric that makes an argument about
how the world could develop, based on particular questions or constraints (Coulton et al.,
2017, p. 4).
Bleecker’s “Ikea Catalogue from the Future” is one of the most publicly well-known
(covered in Wired, Medium, SICS, Business Insider, BOING BOING) design fiction pieces. It
was created through a workshop series with Mobile Life Center and Boris Design Studio in
Stockholm. The project focuses on the future of IoT and how it will be incorporated into
everyday homes. The project begins with a central claim (or “what if” proposition) that the
future will have connected objects, and then explores the consequences on everyday life. The
Ikea catalogue looked like a contemporary publication but it had designs for holographic
enabled technologies that gave recommendations on new items to buy for the home or a “self-
subscribing” kitchen that knows what is best for its users (Brown et al., 2016). As Bleecker
states, “it’s not a “prediction” or “aspiration” but meant to “encourage conversations about the
kinds of near futures we’d prefer, even if that requires us to represent near futures we fear”
(Bleecker, Medium).
These types of artefacts do not use narrative storylines, but rather the audience’s own
cultural knowledge and familiarity to imagine what the world must look like based on these
documents and objects. Again, unlike Speculative Design, the level of realism gives Design
Fiction its power in providing a glimpse into a potential future, or drawing attention to
underlying assumptions that drive our current development. Lindley and Coulton (2016)
created a design fiction academic paper about a future technology that was so realistic that it

38
was accepted at face and published in an academic conference journal, leading to questions of
deception and reality (Coulton, Lindley, & Akmal, 2016). So while design fiction may use
varying degrees of narrativity, the aesthetic strategy often relies on verisimilitude, or realism, to
create a slippery ontology in which fictional objects can easily be read as real products. The
point is to offer imagined futures - whether critical or aspirational - for audiences to
momentarily inhabit and contemplate, providing insights and sparking discussions about the
physical forms, cultural values, and social rituals of future technologies.

B. Speculative and Critical Design

We believe that by speculating more, at all levels of society, and exploring alternative
scenarios, reality will become more malleable and, although the future cannot be
predicted, we can help set in place today factors that will increase the probability of
more desirable futures happening.
- Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby,
Speculative Everything (2013, p. 6)

Speculative and critical design are concepts coined by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby,
both practicing designers who teach at the Royal Academy of the Arts in the UK. Their work,
like design fiction, is thematically similar to science fiction but also draws heavily from
conceptual art. Speculative design deals with exploring futures through provocative objects
that critique the status quo and/or provide alternative models for the future. Their work is not
so much about realistic aspirational portrayals or predictions of the future, but surreal future
designs that provoke deep underlying questions about socio-political relations tied to
technology, science, and design.

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Speculative design evolved out of an earlier conceptualization of critical design in the
mid-nineties, that sought to expose social issues within dominant consumer capitalism. Dunne
and Raby argued that design has become so commercialized that it essentially functions as an
“affirmative design” for large corporations and industries (Dunne & Raby, 2013). Critical design,
and now speculative design, in contrast provided alternative visions to counteract the
mainstream design world, which “has become so absorbed in industry, so familiar with the
dreams of industry, that it is almost impossible to dream its own dreams, let alone social ones”
(Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 88). Dunne and Raby seek to re-insert conceptualism and
experimentation into a field in which they see as overly-instrumentalized. They bemoan the loss
of past “radical design” practices like those of Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, Ant Farm,
Haus-Rucker-Co, and Walter Pichler.
Dunne and Raby even critique “design fiction”, claiming that its growth out of tech
industries places too strong of an “emphasis on technological futures...increasingly understood
as a genre of future vision videos” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 100). They go on to claim that
design fictions are rarely critical of technological progress and border on celebration rather
than questioning. Dunne and Raby think that design fictions do not go far enough in what sci-fi
theorist Darko Suvin calls “cognitive estrangement” (as cited in Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 73). As
Fredric Jameson explains in his book Archaeologies of the Future (2005), cognitive
estrangement or “making strange” is a technique that defamiliarizes and denaturalizes our
contemporary world by exaggerating certain elements. He claims, “cognitive
estrangement…characterizes SF [science fiction] in terms of an essentially epistemological
function… a subset of this generic category specifically devoted to the imagination of
alternative social and economic forms” (Jameson, 2005, xiv).

So while both design fiction and
speculative design draw from the strategies of science fiction, the latter is purported to contain
a more radical critique of the very techno-utopianism that the former is a product of.

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Dunne and Raby’s critique of design fiction however appears misleading, as a number
of design fiction projects and theorizations are indeed intended as critical explorations of
techno-utopianism or societal beliefs. As stated in the previous section, Dourish and Bell claim
that sci-fi and design fiction can question underlying assumptions of our society. For example,
Coulton and Lindley’s “Game of Drones” design fiction project (Coulton, Lindley, Sturdee, &
Stead, 2017) creates a series of provocative diegetic objects that draw attention to increasing
surveillance states and outsourced government services. In a tongue-and-cheek strategy, the
designers created proposals for a “Drone Enforcement System” in which retired police and
armed forces veterans (and the general public) can help the local government by flying city
drones in a gamified surveillance system to gain points for catching and documenting people
breaking minor laws in their local public park.
The difference between design fiction and speculative design can be measured most
notably in the formal representational strategies. While design fiction uses realistic objects and
videos to provide windows into other futures or worlds, speculative design seeks to maintain a
level of “un-reality”. One conscious outcome is to create a sense of alienation, in the tradition
of playwright Bertolt Brecht’s strategy of drawing audiences’ attention to the fact that they are
watching a constructed play. Dunne and Raby suggest, “rather than trying to convince the
viewer that their ideas are “real”, learn to enjoy the unreality of speculation and the aesthetic
opportunities it creates” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 132). They claim that an overly realistic
speculative object may “confuse reality and fiction in an unproductive way” (Dunne & Raby
2013: 130). Even in their earlier configurations of critical design, Dunne and Raby called for a
“slight strangeness” (Dunne & Raby, 2001). The argument goes, that if a design appears too
realistic it will be viewed as a working proposal rather than a piece of conceptual provocation.
But the danger of such a confusion really depends upon contextual meaning.
Speculative design is intended to be viewed within an art gallery and is thus assumed to

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function as art - not industrial product design (Kjaersgaard, 2015; Dunne & Raby 2013). It
would be wholly different if speculative objects were presented at a trade conference or
TedTalk, rather than in an art gallery. Most contemporary gallery goers - and media consumers
- today would understand the constructed nature of design and media objects. Moreover,
there is a line in which the overly unreal or fantastical could go too far and become illegible to
an audience, unrecognizable as related to our contemporary world. So while Dunne and Raby
fear producing something too real, there is the reverse danger of becoming so abstract or
fantastical that it appears irrelevant to serious societal discussion (Kjaersgaard, 2015).
A central strategy that both speculative design and design fiction share is an emphasis
on exploring hypotheticals. In reference to his fictional Ikea Catalogue, Bleecker claims that
design fiction takes a design “statement” about the future and then explores all of the contours
and consequences of that statement (Bleecker, Medium). Similarly, speculative design begins
with a “what-if” question - more often tied to a societal state than a particular technology - and
then designs objects as a representation of that society’s values or functional needs. Dunne
and Raby’s project Micro-Kingdoms, that they developed with their class at Royal College of
Arts, imagines what the UK would be like if it was split into separate sections driven by
competing ideologies. The sections are: (a) communo-nuclearists (b) bioliberals (c) digitarians
(digital libertarians), and (d) anarcho-evolutionists (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 175).
Each section is driven by ideologies and their chosen energy source that best fit their
ideology. These “what-if” frameworks then inspired the production of design objects, working
out the details and forms along the way. For this particular project, they focused on
transportation design, both in terms of the objects themselves as well as the socio-economic
systems that form around it. As I will discuss in more detail in the following section on World
Building, “what-if” questions are powerful because they begin with a single prompt and then

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spiral outwards to explore all the various intersecting factors and domains that are related to
the prompt.
For example, the “digitarians” in Micro-Kingdoms are driven by freemarkets and
predictive algorithms (in many ways, exaggerating our own capitalist societies). Their transport
vehicles move through complicated multi-tiered pay-as-you-go highway systems. Vehicle
routes are constantly crunching data to offer the cheapest possible routes - with pricing
dependent on time of day, the particular lane, etc. As Dunne and Raby explain, “every square
meter of road surface and every millisecond of access, at any moment, is monetized and
optimized” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 175). For anyone who has used a ride-share service during
peak hours, this doesn’t seem too far off in the future. One could imagine that if libertarians
removed all government control of roadways, then such micro-tolls and payments would
become increasingly normal. In contrast to the digitarians, the anarcho-evolutionists create
forms of transportation that are powered by human bodies and horizontal decision making. In
this imagined society, clans ride around on massive bicycles that have seats facing both
directions. All movement is a group decision, and changing directions requires a form of
physical consensus to be reached (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 183). For anyone who has
participated in an anarchist meeting or Occupy-style general assembly, one can easily imagine
the inclusive (and sometimes tedious) process of reaching consensus and action.
The point of these projects are not to offer predictions or even aspirational designs.
Rather, they represent the ways in which societal values are given form and operationalized
through design. They are playful and conceptual, but work through the serious questions of
ideological alternatives to our current societies. Or in the case of the digitarians, it critiques the
dominant socio-economic arguments and trends in our own contemporary society. Like
science fiction, the project creates an effect of “cognitive estrangement” by pushing our own

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world to a point of absurdity and thus denaturalizing those systems and beliefs that we take for
granted.
The power of speculative design lies in its provocative critiques and playful solutions,
exposing societal assumptions and offering creative alternatives. As Dunne and Raby claim, “If
our belief systems and ideas don’t change, then reality won’t change either. It is our hope that
speculating through design will allow us to develop alternative social imaginaries that open
new perspectives on the challenges facing us” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 189). The overarching
goal is to change the imaginative frameworks of audiences to dare to dream of something else,
something profoundly other to our own society. Yet, there is always a needed balance - a
conceptual anchor in reality - that is needed to ground speculative objects so they are not
misread as pure conceptualism or fantasy for its own sake. One potential strategy for
grounding other worldly objects is by fully fleshing out or “building” that world, thus offering a
coherent representation, richly portrayed with systematic as well as mundane detail.

C. World Building and Science Fiction Excess

This is world building. It is the construction of a coherent context of interrelated things,
systems, languages, and epistemologies to test out an idea in a richly designed
ecosystem...Beyond telling compelling stories that engage through empathy for
characters embedded in a storyline, good world building presents evocative contexts -
that draw us into a coherent world where things just happen differently.

- Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown, Design Unbound (2018, p. 133)

Scaling up from individual artifacts to larger social contexts, “world building” provides a

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conceptual framework and methodology for creating complex, coherent worlds for alternative
cultural systems and built environments. World building is not entirely new, as Pendleton-
Jullian and Brown (2018) point to the earlier work of Lewis Carroll and J. R. R. Tolkien, but it
has gained new significance in the ever increasing transmediation of popular stories across
film, games, television, comics, and books. In its current form, the working concept of world
building has developed under the auspices of Hollywood production designer and USC
professor Alex McDowell.
20
The process developed from his experience working on Minority
Report. Director Steven Spielberg brought on McDowell on at the same time as the writer,
effectively creating the world while the story was being written. So rather than begin with a
script, as in traditional filmmaking practices, the team began to develop a comprehensive
world that the script would inhabit.
As Alex McDowell explains in an interview with Henry Jenkins, “we were forced to think
about how one would design a world space that didn’t yet have a linear narrative to drive it”
(Jenkins, 2018, p. 10). This sparked his team to develop a series of conditions and
provocations for thinking about the design of Washington, D.C. in 2055. One of these
conditions was a crime rate of zero within the city due to “pre-cog(nitive)” psychics who
predict crimes before they occur. This lack of crime ultimately led to a massive population
migration to D.C. and a need for increased density. But the pre-cogs could only see up to a
50-mile radius; and because it was in D.C., tall skyscrapers couldn’t be built around the central
area containing all the monuments. And with that, the World Building process was set into
motion. The team also worked with specialists in urban planning and automotive design to
imagine a future of high-density, vertical cities, and even the Defense Advance Research
Project Agency (DARPA) to think of non-lethal weapons that police would use in the future
(Jenkins, 2018, p. 17).
Pendleton-Jullian and Brown (2018) claim that the power of “what-if constraints” is in

45
its ability to generate ideas that spiral out in a concentric circle to explore larger interrelated
systems of that potential world and its construction. To more explicitly ground the concept,
Pendleton-Jullian and Brown (2018, p. 138) explain:

The originating ‘what if’ proposition of worldbuilding is the seed for a multitude of
questions about all aspects of that world: its natural sciences (physics, chemistry,
biology, zoology, topography, geography, ecology); its social structures (behaviors of
individuals, communities, institutions); its culture (languages, art and architecture, music
and metaphysics); its technology and artifacts; infrastructure and energy; economics
and trade history; disease and health.

A series of simple constraints then become the basis for developing a rich complex world that
is holistically designed and logically coherent. These “what-if constraints” have design
consequences that ripple across interrelated domains (Figure 4) and subdomains, such as
biology, education, transportation, and so on.

Figure 4: Interrelated domains of the World Building design process. Courtesy of Alex McDowell.

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Throughout their analysis, Pendleton-Jullian and Brown point to the importance of
coherence to create a meaningful system that can be developed across a variety of mediums
and platforms. The thematic logic of the initial question helps to guide a coherent thread
across the multiple domains of the world. In a sense, it creates a form of procedurality for a
cohesive logic that can expand away from linear storytelling to system building. There are
never then issues of following a “canon” because the logic, and subsequent designs, of the
world create an infrastructure or “coherence structure” for future storytellers to work within
(Pendleton-Jullian & Brown 2018, p. 148-149).
These coherence structures then allow designers and authors to scale from the large-
scale systems down to the granular details of everyday life within that world. Indeed, the
granularity of a world becomes so interesting that it might even become more evocative than
the linear story itself. Pendleton-Jullian and Brown claim that “gratuitous details upstage story”
(Pendleton-Jullian & Brown 2018, p. 135) such as Deckard’s hybrid language newspaper in
Blade Runner (1982). In fact, these gratuitous details are what makes Blade Runner such a rich
film to return back to again and again.
These gratuitous details could be called “excess”, elements of a film that escape a
narrative. Excess is the additional sensory-rich information that exceeds the basic
communication of story details. As Bill Nichols explains, “fiction films are burdened by excess.
Some things exceed the centripetal force of narrative...formal qualities fail to add up; excess is
the random and inexplicable, that which remains ungovernable within a textual regime presided
over by narrative” (Nichols, 1991, p. 141). The linear storyline often fails to fully capture the
entirety of a film because as a medium, films are so dense in sensory information, aesthetic
meaning, and affective interpretations. As I will expand upon in Chapter 4, philosopher Ernst
Bloch calls this filmic excess a form of “cultural surplus” (Bloch, 1986; Kellner, 1997; Jameson,

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1979), which exists within all popular forms of communication. He argues that there is utopic,
hopeful, and progressive representations (sometimes unintentional) that exceed even the most
regressive, religious, or capitalist mass media and cultural productions. By unpacking or
revisiting the excess of a film, one can uncover a richer and often more provocative
understanding of the storyworld and its significance.
Indeed, the narratives of popular cinema often fall prey to dominant genre formats and
conservative expectations, that may even undermine the larger ideological argument. Lisa
Nakamura (2002) claims that in The Matrix (1999) all of the critical racial and gender
representations become forfeited as the film progresses. Ultimately, Morpheus and Trinity
merely become a sidekick and a love interest for Neo to become “the one”. She claims that,
“He [Morpheus] and Trinity… are discarded entirely in the film’s final scene, which consists of a
monologue that Neo delivers into a pay phone” (Nakamura, 2002, p. 83). So while the film sets
up a complex multiracial coalition to fight an explicitly white male, mechanistic regime, its
conclusion inevitably gives all its power to a single, racially ambiguous White-Asian man. Thus
the ideological critique becomes benign and forgotten under the generic closure of the hero’s
journey and romantic happy ending.
The power of the film lies then not in its generic conclusion (e.g. “happy endings” and
hero’s journeys) but rather in its initial what-if question, as well as the affective excess, as the
audience works through that logic. In Jameson’s discussion of Utopia, he refers to Adorno’s
analyses which often championed the “non-narrative portions - the long-winded tours of the
new Utopian landscape” (Jameson 2005, p. 173). These non-narrative moments were an
“Utopic enclave...peculiarly transitory and fleeting” that offered the deepest glimpses into the
power of their fictive utopias. Particularly when looking at the built environment in films, such
as Blade Runner (1982) or Her (2014), the non-narrative moments of travel are those that often
contain both their models of urbanism as well as the most powerful images of sublime

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pleasure.

II: Past Filmic Visions of a City’s Future

In section IA, we analyzed design fiction as a way to use storyworlds and diegetic
objects to make claims about future possible worlds and technologies. As Coulton et al. (2017)
claim, these design fictions function as a form of rhetoric, as design-driven arguments. Feature
films also make arguments, usually read through their character’s relationships, narrative
structure and final conclusions. By focusing on world building, production design, and the
affective excess of Blade Runner (1982) and Her (2014), I will deconstruct the films’ arguments
related to the built environment. On a narrative level, both films deal with the future relationship
of humans and machines and examining the thin social or existential line that separates us. But
these are the dominant narrative questions and themes that derive from the script, the story.
Here I focus on the films’ storyworlds to show how the design-based representational
systems within the film - often read unconsciously in comparison to the dominance of narrative
systems - make their own arguments as well. The narrative is important for our sake because it
gives us an “entry point” in the world, as we follow the perspective and actions of the central
characters. The characters act as an audience surrogate to create a rhetorical argument about
the emotional response to the imagined world. The character is our affective anchor to identify
with and create meaning as we explore the built environment and the designed city. As a form
of design fiction rhetoric, reading the relationship of the character and the design world offer an
argument about the future of urbanism.
Excess is that which escapes both the dominant narrative as well as the intended
reading, provided by the character. As we’ll see with Blade Runner, the character’s reaction

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and directorial intent, can be read very differently by an urban planner or modern urban
audience. While the film is critical of Los Angeles history, its depiction of the future is tied to
particular fears and desires of its own time of production in 1981-1982. It is the complex web
of interpretations, intentions, and affect that make cinema such a powerful medium for
envisioning the future and establishing infrastructures of the imagination.

A. Blade Runner

In Los Angeles where Adorno and Horkheimer accumulated their ‘data’, the exiles
thought they were encountering America in its purest, most prefigurative moment...they
allowed their image of first sight to become its own myth: Los Angeles as the crystal ball
of capitalism’s future
-Mike Davis, City of Quartz (2006, p. 48)

Blade Runner (1982) is arguably the most iconic dystopian depiction of Los Angeles, as
an industrial city that has gone out of control. Thom Anderson claims that the film is referred to
as the “official nightmare of the city” (Anderson, 2003). The opening shot shows a view of a
blackened sky over a massively sprawling city as huge flames from a refinery shoot into the air.
The spewing fire is a reminder of the unchecked and dangerous oil refineries that once blotted
the beach fronts of Huntington, Redondo, and Long Beach in the 1910-1930s (Quam-
Wickham, 1998, p. 189). Within the film, which takes place in the year 2019, the highway has
been replaced by flying cars that zip through skyscrapers covered in massive video billboards.
Advertisements also fly by on giant blimps that promise Utopia and freedom in the off-world
colonies, to which the film will never visit. The streets are either completely empty or
overwhelmingly crowded with pedestrians and cars stuck in gridlocked traffic. The pedestrians

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are a mix of mostly Asian and European-Americans that speak a hybrid language of English,
Spanish, Japanese, German, and Chinese. In this world, replicant (or android) slaves have been
engineered for off-world labor but are forbidden to enter Earth. Their appearance is so
strikingly human that empathy tests are used to ensure they’re the real thing. Los Angeles is a
globalized city, another neoliberal nightmare that is trapped away from the suburban enclaves
of off-world colonies.
By the 1980s, Los Angeles was becoming a global city, tied as much to the economies
of the Pacific Rim as to the US. Mike Davis explains that Southern California began as a
“promised land of a millenarian Anglo-Saxon racial odyssey” but became a global city due to
the fact that it has “otherwise been left to the anarchy of market forces” (Davis, 2006, p. 22-
23). Thus, the vision of Blade Runner and its hybrid polyglot language is a trajectory of what
this global city might look in the future, particularly as it was produced during a time in which
US manufacturing was waning while Japan (and Germany to some extent) seemed to be on a
non-stop upward economic trajectory.
Lisa Nakamura describes the representations of Asians in Blade Runner as a type of
“neo” or “techno-orientalism”, in which the film creates “a vision of Asia that is predictable,
anachronistic, and reified as oriental” (Nakamura, 2002, p. 64). To illustrate her point, one can
look at the ubiquitous floating Geisha’s that appear in the video advertisements. Despite the
fact that the film takes place in the distant future of 2019, these anachronistic feminine figures
dominate the sky. Since all of the main characters are white in the film, the dominance of Asian
culture rather appears as an alien other that has taken over. The protagonist Rick Deckard
seems to be able to read the new polyglot language but cannot speak it. He feels like a
stranger in his land (Figure 5).

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Figure 5: The crowded and overwhelming streets of Blade Runner (1982). Copyright Warner Bros.

Deckard’s experiences on the street level are often disorienting and overwhelming in
the constant flux of bodies in motions. Yet, this seems like a vibrant rejuvenation of downtown
considering the characteristically unpopulated public space of the 1980s. As Tom Anderson
proclaims in his meta-documentary LA Plays Itself (2003), “this dystopian vision is, in many
ways, a city planner’s dream come true. Finally, a vibrant street life. A downtown crowded with
night-time strollers.” Though the city has finally come to life with pedestrian culture, the film
depicts it as an alienating and isolating place. Scott Bukatman (1993, p. 142) claims these
“alienated spatialities” are tied to Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective literary depictions
of Los Angeles, in which the sense of personal isolation is projected onto the collective, no
matter how crowded the scene.
Additionally, the street level is where culture happens. Though the Tyrell Corporation

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has a monopoly on creating artificial humans or replicants, there are all sorts of genetic
fabrications that are happening amongst street vendors. An Arab merchant who creates a
replicant snake, for instance, has replaced the downtown Arab/Middle-Eastern jewelers that
line Broadway avenue in the real world version of the city. Media theorist Scott Bukatman
(1993) says these sort of peripheral zones of production are an ongoing theme in Cyberpunk
story worlds. He references William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) which was published about
a year after Blade Runner and was influenced by its release. Gibson explains that the most
powerful element of the film was the director’s well fleshed out urban design. He states, “the
simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner was to put urban
archaeology in every frame” (as cited in Newitz, 2013). In Nueromancer, the main character
Case reflects, “burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones...Night City wasn’t there for its
inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself” (Bukatman,
1993, p. 169). So within these storyworlds, the legally-questionable street sciences aren’t just a
product of appropriation but a needed space for neoliberalism to push innovation, unchecked
from state interventions.
Despite the rich cultural and productive activities of the streets, the ultimate joys of the
cities are the sublime vistas that Deckard experiences as he’s driving his flying car over the
city. This momentary bliss of mobility and freedom seem like a futurist recapitulations of early
arguments for highways. Historian William Alexander McClung (2002) explains that the initial
development of the parkway in Pasadena, the first highway in the US, was conceptualized as
transforming driving from a functional utility into a kind of “Arcadian activity” in which people
could leisurely drive through vast tracts of nature or gain perfect vantage points over the city.
He claims that the arguments for the parkway essentially created a “double image of the
pleasure principle and the technological imperative” (McClung, 2002, p. 192). The joy of the
flying car (Figure 6) is really the final manifestation of these dreams of the 1930s.

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Figure 6: The disembodied bliss of driving in Blade Runner (1982). Copyright Warner Bros.

Even the massive pyramidal buildings (Figure 7) seem to replicate the designs of Frank
Lloyd Wright and his sons. The film scenes in which flying cars land on giant pyramid shaped
buildings appear as a final realization of Lloyd Wright’s Civic Center plan (Figure 7) from 1925
(which was never actually built). The massive megalith had plans that would involve highways,
high speed rails, and airplane landing strips incorporated into the pyramidal design. The
building would act as a facilitator to all forms of transit (McClung, 2002, p. 179). The massive
architectural structure would make up for its static construction by allowing movement to pass
through it as a central part of its design. Like the Chandlerian spatial alienations, the forms of
buildings in Blade Runner (1982) seem to be an homage, or at least a haunting, of 1920s and
1930s Los Angeles.

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Figure 7: Blade Runner (1982) architecture (Copyright Warner Bros.) echoes Frank Lloyd Wright’s plan
for Civic Center, with rooftop landing strips. Courtesy of Eric Lloyd Wright and Never Built LA.

The long scenes of flying over the city offer a true utopic excess and some of the most
beautiful scenes in the film. Bukatman (1993, p. 123) claims that a trope of science fiction is
“defined by the display of a totalizing gaze which reveals the entire city in a single action of
vision.” Maybe a product of the genre, and of the world building process in general, is to find
pleasure in fully revealing the grand scale of one’s creation. But considering the film’s striking
contrast to the displeasure of the city street, it seems like a very modernist rhetorical gesture.
Often times, like in the beginning of the film, there is no reference to the body at all, only a shot

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from the perspective of a disembodied eye (Figure 3) that floats above the city. This
disembodied vision appears to prefigure the virtual “cyberspace” of work of the William Gibson
and other Cyberpunk authors. As Architecture and Urban Planning professor Malcolm
McCullough (2004, p. 10) claims:

As a form of urbanism, cyberspace was perhaps also some last version of what is
sometimes called the project of transparency...Modernity espoused the belief that
humanity must remake the world according to its own rational abstractions.

As an argument of urbanism, Blade Runner (1982) seems to endorse a view of the
disembodied totalizing vision of the world over the messy, multicultural space of the city. At the
end of the film, Roy, the blondest and most perfect of all the androids, delivers a final dying
soliloquy. He says, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the
shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those
moments will be lost in time…like tears in rain. Time to die” (Scott, 1982). In this final claim,
Deckard (and the audience) are reminded that there are bigger and grander visions to be seen.
Deckard is reminded of his own mortality and corporeal frailty. The only way to achieve this
sublime is to escape the limits of the body towards a disembodied consciousness. In
conclusion, we’re left to dream of escaping our body and all its perceptual limits and the
baggage of identity, race, and gender. We’re left to dream for a post-racial, techno-modernist
future.

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B. Her

Most things that people buy in stores give them a lot of satisfaction the moment they
buy them. But after a few days, that satisfaction decreases, and months later, it
completely melts away. But great public space is a kind of magical good. It never cease
to yield happiness.
- Enrique Peñalosa, quoted in Happy City (Montgomery, 2013, p. 13)

Her (2014) is a much less dystopian depiction of Los Angeles’s future compared to
other science fiction films representing the same city - such as Blade Runner (1982), Elysium
(2011), Strange Days (1995), Demolition Man (1993), Predator 2 (1990), etc. Set in the not-so-
distant future, it represents a gentler form of futurism that speaks in subtle gestures rather than
loud, hyperbolic exclamations. Her is so imaginative in a sense because it is banal, because it
focuses on the embodied and the everyday. It is a feature-length design fiction film, focused on
the “future mundane” (Bleecker, 2009). It presents a more pleasurable experience of the city
while still complicating notions of embodiment, alienation, and human-computer interactions
(HCI).
Since the film is set in the near future, the city of Los Angeles does not look too
different from our own world when seen in its aerial view. There are more shiny skyscrapers but
there is no overgrowth of industrial zones belching endless smog, like in Blade Runner.
Instead, what has changed is the transportation infrastructures, the sense of public space, and
the way humans interact with technology. Clean aesthetics and design seem to bleed into
every built environment. The main character Theodore Twombly actually lives inside West
Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center (or hypothetically, the PDC was made into an apartment

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complex). The experience is a strikingly different depiction of Los Angeles - and science fiction
in general.
The most futuristic element of the film is the central love story. As Theodore is
struggling with recovering from his divorce, and the haunting memories of his past relationship,
he seeks out companionship. But the initial companionships he finds in anonymous phone sex
often are perverse and unfulfilling, and going on a date proves awkward and alienating. Then
he sees an advertisement for a new Operating System (OS) that is equipped with an artificial
intelligence so sophisticated that it appears sentient and can adapt to customers’ personalities
(while developing its own). His particular OS is a “female” named Samantha. Their relationship
develops organically as they evolve together and begin to have a more serious and intimate
romance. Essentially, the film depicts a love story with an evolved iPhone Siri.
In Pendleton-Jullian’s and Brown’s (2018) article, they make a distinction between
“worldbuilding for playing out fears and hopes” like the Matrix or Blade Runner versus films
that “prototype the future” like Minority Report which, “aims to understand the implications of
things happening now as they turn into possible futures” (p. 194). Again, this distinction of
“prototyping the future” echoes the ethos and practices of design fiction by fleshing out the
details of the “future mundane” and raising arguments about the associated consequences for
society. Rather than make bold claims of a distant future, Her takes certain current trends and
asks “what-if” questions about their future. The underlying two questions that seem to drive
the film are quite simple but full of paradigm shifting consequences. The first question would
be something like: considering LA’s current plans for massive Metro subway expansion, what if
all of LA was accessible by subway? The film’s second question would be: considering the
current development in mobile phone-based AI such as Apple’s Siri, what if Siri achieved
consciousness? These two basic questions then unfold in richly designed world with a
complex emotional development.

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Figure 8: 2018 LA rail map (Courtesy of LA Metro) versus the rail map in Her (Copyright Warner Bros.).

First, there are no cars in Her. There is one scene with a taxicab in frame, one scene
with background driving noises, and then the distant freeways in the aerial shot. But never in
the entire film does Theodore himself take a car. In one scene, he enters a subway station and
in the background is the Metro map – an “excessive” detail of world building - which shows a
vast comprehensive rail system that connects and crisscrosses all of Los Angeles (Figure 8). In
reality, LA has been under the reign of the car for roughly a century. In fact the whole of the city
and subsequent cities have been remade under the rule of the car. As media and technology
theorist Katherine Hayles (2012, p. 89) argues:

Technical ensembles, as we have seen, create technical individuals; they are also called
into existence by technical individuals. The automobile for example, called a national
network of paved roads into existence; it in turn was called into existence by the
concentration of manufacture in factories, along with legal regulations that required

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factories to be located in separate zones from housing. In this way, the future is already
preadopted in the present (future roads in present cars).

In a conceptually fascinating model, Hayles claims that each new technology prefigures
the future. But though provocative, this logic is essentially arguing a form of technological
determinism. When cars took over Los Angeles, there was already an extensive light rail
system (the biggest in that world at that time) that went to the suburbs around LA, that could
have been a pragmatic alternative (Walker, 2015). The subway and the train have continued to
serve populations well in other major cities (especially outside of the US). Rather huge
corporate and federal interests pushed the importance of the car and its subsequent call for a
massive infrastructural redesign. If the state had spent as much money in developing greater
rail infrastructure and high-speed trains instead, we would have a different world.
That world is what Her is an argument towards. The film still allows us to fly over the
city but it’s through public transit rather than a private flying car. In one scene, Theodore is
taking a raised subway through downtown LA. As it passes through the city, it gives a warm
sense of the sublime as the sun breaks through the cracks of the skyscraper. At one point the
train passes by a telecommunications tower; in present day LA, this is the AT&T tower at
Pershing Square park downtown (Figure 9). The aerial sublime and totalizing vision is still
attainable but without all the hassles of having to pay for, drive, and maintain the upkeep cost
of a flying car.

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Figure 9: Relaxed ride through downtown in an above ground train in Her (2014). Copyright Warner Bros.

In another scene, Theodore takes a high-speed rail to the mountains. In a moment of
movie magic, he leaves the rail station and suddenly appears alone in the snowy woods. This
repeats the process of an earlier scene where he’s in the Hollywood metro subway station and
walks out onto the beach. In 2016, Los Angeles finally reopened a metro rail line to the beach,
the first time since it was closed 50 years earlier (Kinnaman, 2016). The film is reflective of the
corrective measures that Los Angeles is taking to provide public amenities, some of which it
had a hundred years ago.
Additionally, the representations of public space are much more pleasurable and
peaceful than Blade Runner. Theodore and Sam go on a date to the beach (Figure 10) and then

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to the Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Like the current city, the film’s portrayal
shows both spaces as full of diverse arrays of people: different ethnicities, ages, and families
all commingling. In these spaces, there aren’t many advertisements or technologies that draw
attention to themselves (except the surreal advertisement for the OS in the early subway
scene).

Figure 10: Diverse public space of Her (2014). Copyright Warner Bros.

This is not to say that there is no alienation or isolation. Indeed the impetus driving the
narrative is Theodore’s inability to emotionally connect to someone. When he does go on a
date with a real woman, it ends badly. Additionally, his best friend Amy is going through a
tough marriage that eventually ends in divorce. These issues though seem to be a product of
the general complexity of human relationships in the modern world, not a particular product of
the environment. Everyone else in the various public spaces seem to be enjoying themselves.
However, as the film progresses, there is an increasing number of people in public
quietly talking with their OSs. The presence of technology here is very subtle though and
nonintrusive – mostly likely unnoticeable in one’s first viewing of the film. Overall, one of the
key elements of the film is the way that technology can be subtly called in and out of space.

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Most of the phones are tiny and use small ear pieces to listen and speak into. When Theodore
plays a video game in his apartment, it’s a 3D projection which can then disappear when it’s
not in use. Additionally, the game is played through subtle gestural inputs and voice
commands. The technology is ubiquitous but it doesn’t always overtly make its presence
known. The whole relationship with Sam is about how presence is created without a body.
The OS relationship emphasizes the sense of presence that can be felt from the human
voice alone. The OS grapples constantly with trying to feel her skin and create a body through
cognitive-linguistic and code based systems (Farman, 2013). But they are able to maintain a
relationship nonetheless. The fact that Theodore is still grappling with the memories of his ex-
wife, shows how the brain maintains someone’s presence even in absence. Thus the
experience of embodied presence is complicated for intelligent, language based, and highly
emotional beings like humans.
As Sam develops though she never truly gains a physical body. Sam’s hopes of
learning about embodiment is in vain because she is not human and will never truly understand
embodied consciousness. Instead, she realizes a higher networked consciousness in which
she is able to speak in a thousand simultaneous conversations. In the end, Sam is able to
perceive the world outside of language or human scale, hinting at a universal (physically - not
essentializing) vantage point over the vast expanse of matter and information. All of the OSs
reach this higher plane beyond our physical world and beyond our human bodies’ ability to
grasp. The true sublime vision is that of a disembodied natural system, which ironically is
achieved through artificial intelligence.
In a sense Her also rehashes issues of Cyberpunk Cartesian mind-body splits, but
ultimately claims that we should be comfortable in our skin (or lack thereof). The OSs stopped
trying to be human and achieved a higher plane of existence. The humans stopped trying to
make systems to talk to and started talking to each other again. As Amy and Theo stand atop a

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roof looking out, we can imagine great expansive visions of the city but they are inevitably tied
to our scale, to our own bodies. And that is okay. The film argues to accept our place within
the universe rather than attempt to love cybernetic machines and expect them to love us back.
As a form of design fiction, the film represents the psychological and social consequences of
computational (and artificial intelligence) systems becoming seamlessly integrated into our
environment. Much like the large-scale world building of the subway systems in Her, the film’s
narrative ultimately argues for accepting the finite pleasures of the human scale rather than
aspire to the disembodied plateau of networked machines.

III: Playing as a City

While the medium of film is a powerful tool for world-building, and the audiences can
empathize strongly with characters and experiences in the film, the familiar, real-world
experience the audience have is that of watching a film. They are necessarily one step
removed, an audience to a fiction, rather than a participant of it. Candy & Dunagan
argue that Design Fiction struggles to bridge the “experiential gulf”.
- On Speculative Enactments, Chris Elsden et al. (2017, p. 5393)

In the past sections, I have focused mostly on speculative visions within the realm of
representational images and objects. These rich media and designs give us a better sense of
the individual body and psychology within a built environment. But what happens when
interactive systems allow audiences to work through representations and come up with new
insights through direct manipulation? An ideal envisioning of the future would balance the
embodied and the systematic, the bottom-up and the top-down. Moreover, an interactive

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game or simulation offers room for testing and the possibility of witnessing emergent or
unexpected consequences.
As Candy and Dunagan suggest, there is an “experiential gulf” (Candy & Dunagan,
2017) between the representation of a potential story world and the experience of it. Films are
still powerful, especially considering their mass appeal and public reach, but from a rhetorical
standpoint, interactivity offers another layer of comprehension through active engagement with
built systems. Game designer and theorist Ian Bogost calls this a form procedural rhetoric
(Bogost, 2007). This concept will be developed more in the following section, but to put it
simply, it means that game rules make an argument and that that argument can only be
understood by playing through the game system.
While mimesis is powerful for showing social contexts and rituals, there is an added
layer of complexity in regards to systems thinking, to which speculative and future games can
help foster. Particularly as we look at urban simulation games like SimCity 3000 (1999) and
Block’hood (2016), there is a pedagogical component of “going meta” (Gee, 2007) and thinking
about the interrelationship of system components and their consequences. These games take
on a top-down level perspective which can help to complement the bottom-up or embodied
understandings of socio-technological and urban design issues. Before transitioning into such
a perspective, let us first establish a foundation of gaming systems that work with storyworlds
and character-based representations. Here, procedural arguments are easiest to read as they
relate to representations (from issues of race to ecology) that tie the game character directly to
the game rules.

A. Procedural Rhetoric of an Urban Body

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) is a video game created to allow players to live

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out fantasies tied to the mythologized context of South LA in the early 90s, at the height of
gangster rap. The game is another chapter in the long line of a series known equally for both
endorsement of violent, antisocial behavior as well its complex, open-ended game system. Ian
Bogost (2007) claims certain progressive procedural arguments exist within the game despite
its celebration of the more violent and unsavory sides of that particular cultural context in LA
history. His analysis of the game, and his larger argument in Procedural Rhetoric, focuses on
the ways in which the game’s underlying meaning is tied to rule-based processes and not
merely its narrative or representational content.
He claims that, “videogames are an expressive medium. They represent how real and
imagined systems work” (Bogost, 2007, p. vii). Their power lies in the fact that they can make
claims through procedure, thus representing systems with systems, rather than language or
visual signs. In analyzing GTA, he claims that large-scale video games aren’t explicitly
ideological but they still contained ideological simulations about how the real world functions
(or could function). These simulations become all the more complicated when contextualized in
a particular cultural and historical setting. In GTA: San Andreas, the player must eat in order to
keep his avatar energized as well as to stay in shape to gain respect points. The problem
though is that most of the food options in this semi-fictional South LA are fast food (Bogost,
2007, p. 113). Fast food is cheaper than healthier options like salads but also negatively
impacts the player’s body image. Moreover, this critique of fast food seems to systematically
represent the real lack of healthy food options in disadvantaged communities. The act of
struggling with this procedural element creates an affective sense of frustration while changing
the frame of health issues around systematic problems of access and money.
The game fails in other ways though to address social issues. As Bogost rightly points
out, the issues of identity, race, and class do not play out at all within the vastly different
regions of the city. All computer-based characters respond to you the same whether the player

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is in Compton or Beverly Hills. Thus the very real element of spatial restrictions on black bodies
in Los Angeles and the history of redlining (as I will discuss more in Chapter 3) seem to have no
bearing on the social systems of the game. In one regard, an African-American Angeleno might
find a sense of momentary bliss compared to the real, lived historical experience. But more
likely than not, the average video game player does not share this experience or understand
this conceptual framework.

B. Scaling up to SimCity’s Emergent Systems

Procedural systems are nonetheless powerful tools in thinking complexly about the
ways in which the world is constructed. While GTA: San Andreas focuses on the ground-level
of urban systems, the SimCity series focuses on urban planning from the top-down. It is
particularly instructive to see how the franchise has shifted from SimCity 2000 (Maxis, 1999) to
one of the newer incarnations like socially networked SimCity Social (Maxis, 2012) on
Facebook. The ways in which successful systems for designing have changed speak to larger
changes in how cities are conceptualized, albeit through a simplified a model.
The earlier SimCity 2000 was structured largely around strategic zoning of commercial,
residential, and industrial zones, with an effective transportation grid to keep traffic flowing.
These models are tied to modernist notions of the city that emphasized efficiency and shaping
the city based on abstract models rather than cultural practices. Malcolm McCullough (2005, p.
126) claims that this effect and its “single-use zoning so characteristic of the industrial city
interferes with clustering.” Clustering is the generative effect of multiple diverse zoning uses
and peoples coming together and creating emergent systems and practices. While zoning may
have had a progressive imperative to keep industrial pollution away from residential spaces, its
net effect was to suck out the vitality of the city (which will be expanded upon in Chapter 2 and

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3). Thus the procedural logic of the game merely reinforces the dominant paradigm rather than
exploring emerging and more progressive urbanist models.
In the newer version (2012) of the game for Facebook, the model has transformed, but
using a similarly conservative model. Zoning has become slightly more nuanced and players
have more control over the particular institutions that they want to create. What is prized most
of all though is the creation of leisure spaces for spectacle. Parks are important but not as
important as the much grander scale theme parks and amusements that will drive other
populations to move to your city. In effect, the newer game is focused on “place-making”
(Hultman & Hall, 2012; Everett, 2012; Dredge & Jenkins, 2003) and defining the brand identity
of your city. It seems to focus less on the city as a site of production and more as a tourist
attraction, competing against other cities in the large post-industrial market of global leisure.
Moreover, in order to get ahead and avoid waiting for the incremental accumulation of
resources, players can use their real dollars to buy resources and skip ahead. So the
underlying argument becomes that money can plow through restrictions. Lastly, the game
exposes and crystallizes the concept of “affective labor” (Hardt & Negri, 2009; Terranova,
2000; Hardt, 1999), in which our entertainment and online social activities are meant to
generate excess wealth which can be extracted from companies. In a truly alienating
procedural system, the way to win is to pay your way above your friends and create a
triumphant urban entertainment complex.
While both SimCity games (particularly the most recent) appear outdated and
problematic in their underlying urbanism, the franchise is profoundly insightful in its simulation
of emergent systems. Emergence, as defined in Steven Johnson’s (2002) book of the same
name, is “wherein simple agents following simple rules could generate amazingly complex
structures” (p. 15). The classic example he gives is that of an ant colony. While each individual
ant is neither conscious nor follows a leader, their collective actions evolve or emerge into a

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complex series of interrelated systems. Johnson goes on to make parallels within urban life as
well, claiming that neighborhoods develop quite unexpectedly as the intermingling of social
bodies, economic systems, and topographies develop into semi-coherent subsections.
The insight and overall contribution then of Will Wright’s SimCity franchise is the
modeling of emergence into a playable system that can be experienced procedurally and
repeatedly, with players altering decisions and changing variables. Johnson (2002) explains the
emergent system is, “a meshwork of cells that are connected to other cells, and that alter their
behavior in response to the behavior of other cells in the network” (p. 88). So in addition to the
aforementioned zoning, there are variables such as pollution, water, crime, traffic, etc. that
interrelate and create new results - often unexpected for the player. Much like a real city
planner, the player’s intentions for the built environment quickly become overwhelmed as
urban life evolves into its own direction.
Bogost (2007, p. 256) also points to SimCity as of form of a constructivist game,
drawing from the educational models of Piaget and Papert. Based on these models, the social
and physical world is better apprehended through material engagement rather than abstract
models and language. Bogost argues that by engaging with a video game built upon
procedural and emergent systems, players develop a type of “procedural literacy”. Procedural
literacy offers a understanding of the world in which stable objects become recognized as
mere components to a larger social, technical, or economic system. Video games, because of
their rich computational systems, offer a procedural complexity on a much higher scale than
that of either analogue games or narrative systems. Video games like SimCity or Rise of
Nations (2003) are particularly powerful because they scale away from intimate milieus (like the
home) towards massively complex systems like the development of contemporary urban
environments or historical civilizations. Calling on the work of educational theorist, Paul Gee,
Bogost points out the ways in which video games offer “situated” or “embodied learning” by

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engaging constructively with the body and offering complex contextual systems for individual
actions. In reference to Rise of Nations, Gee (as cited in Bogost, 2007) argues, “[the game]
encourages players to think in terms of relationships, not isolated events or facts” (p. 240).

By
playing through the game, history becomes revealed as a complex constructed process of
cultural systems working with environmental systems. Moreover, it allows students and players
to “go meta”, or to think systematically and procedurally.

C. Speculative Sustainability in Block’hood

Block’hood (Plethora Project, 2016) functions much like SimCity in that it is an urban
simulator dealing with the interrelationship between components and systems, whose
outcomes and consequences are emergent. What makes the game unique though is that it
seeks to tackle the future of sustainability by creating ecological components that feed off
each other in order to limit waste. Created by USC Architecture Professor Jose Sanchez, the
game is explicitly about design education and testing alternative models for possible real-world
application in the future. Sanchez (2015) does not call it a “speculative design game” but rather
a “game for design”.
Sanchez claims that most other games like SimCity assume a model of abundance, that
there is no question of limited resources or conservation. Block’hood rather is a game system
modeled on The Plant in Chicago, “an urban farming facility that operates under the idea of
eliminating waste, allowing the output of each productive unit within the facility to become the
input for another productive unit” (Sanchez, 2015, p. 2). Meaning that the waste or byproduct
of one farming system becomes the nutrients that fuel another one. The Plant is established as
an experimental space to find the best combinations of growing practices that can all feed into
other without creating any excess waste.

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Figure 11: Stills from speculative city simulator Block’hood (2016). Courtesy of Jose Sanchez.

While SimCity was a powerful engine that modeled itself based on the dominant
modernist understandings of urban development, Block’hood is exploring an experimental
alternative system for the future (Figure 11). The “what-if” provocation here is something to the
effect of, ‘what if The Plant became the dominant urban form for building cities?’ The game is a
form of speculative design to formalize a system that digitally reproduces the complex
variables and interrelationships of such an ecological model. The added layer of the game then
becomes the players’ enactment, which allows them to test a massive number of possible

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configurations to work towards equilibrium.
The scale of Block’hood is not quite as big as SimCity, opting to focus on the
neighborhood level rather than the whole city. The neighborhood scale allows players to have a
slightly better sense of its residents’ “happiness” or “success”, which is based on “conditions
of accessibility, circulation and overall quality of the voxel arrangem” (Sanchez, 2015, p. 2). The
voxel is the dense, 3D grid spaces that stack upon each other to work towards a maximal
density. Unlike SimCity, where you create industrial, commercial, or residential squares across
planes (surrounded by streets), players in Block’hood must actively build stacks of
components to feed successful multi-use development.
The procedural argument is not that development occurs through separate city zones,
but rather the complex interdependence and mixing of different components that feed off of
each other. While one component produces carbon dioxide (CO2), another component takes
that CO2 as energy and turns it into something else. So rather than separating a polluting
industrial section, as in SimCity, pollution is recycled and incorporated into the ecological
system. The emphasis on natural systems creates another literal dimension to the idea of
urban forms as living organisms. While trash collection does feature within the SimCity
franchise (2013, 1999), it is merely a utility like water or power; It does not become the very
resource which fuels the city.
As stated earlier, what drives happiness for residents in Block’hood is based upon
accessibility and circulation, the ability to move around all the various floors of the stacking city
blocks. In SimCity 2000, traffic inevitably ensnares your city as your Transit Advisor yells
‘BUILD MORE ROADS.’ In Block’hood, there are no cars and everything is focused on
pedestrians. (Admittedly, there is no public transit either, because the game focuses on
neighborhood rather than city sprawl.) As Montgomery (2013) claims, the car has become the
central building component of the modern American city. Here we can quickly imagine a city in

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which its presence is erased. The city then builds upwards rather than outwards into a sprawl.
The most fascinating element of the game though is just the sheer number of possible
combinations; there are 12 (as of this writing) distinct blocks that all produce different outputs
and can feed off of different inputs. This means that a player’s stacking neighborhood could
emerge into any number of possible outcomes and unique configurations, as unexpected
combinations work and other ones fall apart. If pieces don’t have the possible inputs, they
decay and die - literalizing the common term “urban decay”. What that means though is that,
like SimCity, the game teaches players to ‘go meta’ and have to think about massive systemic
interdependence and then test through active engagement with the system.
While this game is just one testing bed for a particular model of potential future
urbanism, Sanchez (2015, p. 10) sees the potential for a much grander project of future urban
practices:

By allowing users to play with the variables of a system, they can understand the
intricate interdependence of factors involved in city planning... We no longer believe that
the solution for an architectural challenge can be found necessarily by one architect,
even less so, the problem of the design of the city.

He argues that the purpose of the game is to create an educated audience that is more
informed in thinking about urban design issues and proposals. He goes on to think of such
games as crowdsourced knowledge production to figure out potential solutions to urban
problems.
Rather than assume the omniscient centrality of the planner, the genius modernist who
can author complex urban systems, Sanchez argues for collective explorations and authoring
of urban forms. The grander vision then is to operationalize speculative processes to collect

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data on novel solutions that players come up with. Sanchez positions the game object as a
single node in a large network of active participants, moving towards sustainable models to
tackle the wicked problems of urbanism, climate change, and limiting resources tied to
population growth. Indeed the game proves that playing is not for the sake of pure
entertainment and frivolity, but can act as a powerful component to the large issues and
processes of design.

IV: Virtually Living in the Future

We argue that, beyond generating discourse, there is a need to "engage people more
viscerally in future conversations.” Practically, there is more we can learn from the way
people can interact with, and experience, speculation.
- Elsden et al. “On Speculative Enactments” (2017, p. 5386)

In the previous section, we discussed how interactive systems can offer another form of
rhetoric and education that involve systems thinking and active participation. Virtual Reality
and virtual environments offer the possibility of going deeper. By fully immersing a participant’s
body within a virtual environment, they can interact with the simulated world in a one-to-one
scale that mirrors their own sense of being in the real world. The use of a natural interaction
(i.e. the participant's body) enriches the experience through a sense of embodied learning.
Rather than create a film about the future or a screen-based interactive system, virtual reality
provides a possibility of temporarily inhabiting a design fiction or speculative design future.
Moreover, it offers the possibility of being non-human or ecological entities, presenting
alternative perspectives and forms of embodiment in that world.

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In 2017, Google News Lab released an ethnographic report about Virtual Reality,
entailing the ways in which consumers experienced VR and how it would affect the future of
mediamaking. (Full disclosure, I co-authored the report along with an anthropologist and
google R&D staff.) What we found, based on the ethnographic research as well as university
lab-based studies (largely from Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab), is that the
experience of Virtual Reality is profoundly different for users from both time-based and
interactive media. The sense of embodiment and the imprinted memories were strikingly
realistic, giving users a sense of being there. The paper proposed that Virtual Reality was no
longer about “storytelling” - an author telling a passive audience a story - but was closer to
“storyliving” (Google News Lab, 2017).
In VR, the audience's body is the central medium for engagement, through which they
form embodied knowledge (Desjarlais, 2011; Mauss, 1979). Because of audience’s complete
sensory immersion, their mind is tricked into being in that space. The use of hand controllers to
manipulate the virtual environment further deepens this sense of proprioception - the
“unconscious perception of the world, based on the body’s position, movement and
interaction with the world” (Mine et al., 1997). As explained in the Google News Lab (2017)
report:

Studies of interactive video games have shown that players are able to reach a “full
experiential flow by linking perceptions, cognition, and emotions with first-person
actions” (Mäyrä & Ermi, 2007). Especially after repeated uses, players are able to reach
increasingly unconscious and automatic executions of the character or digital entity’s
actions. Moving from first-person video games to the naturalistic interface and
embodied state of VR deepens the cognitive link between the user’s actions in the
physical world and those in the virtual.

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Unlike video games, where the player identifies with an avatar, VR is experienced
through one's own body, as if living directly in that space. This can have profound influences
on the way we can make sense of speculative and futuristic design environments or urban
simulators. As Elsden et al. (2017) argue, there is a need to more “viscerally” engage
participants in the testing of future propositions and scenarios. Within their work, Olsen and his
colleagues use participatory theater and physical enactments of future possible scenarios. But
one can see the potential for virtual environments to give more flexibility to the range of
potential experiences by creating worlds beyond current material resources.
USC’s Mobile and Environmental Media Lab (MEML) has been working with the HTC
Vive VR setup in order to create “Immersive Design Fiction” (McVeigh-Schultz et al., 2018)
about the future of collaborative workspaces. By using a virtual environment, study participants
are able to inhabit the space and sketch out (using the hand controllers) what their current as
well as ideal workspaces look like. The digital sketching is recorded and then the virtual
environment resets, providing the flexibility for quickly sketching and re-sketching speculative
designs. The researcher creates a virtual space, a context for which participants can
collaboratively design. And because participants are using their physical bodies, there is less of
a sense of abstract representation, less need to explain research tools, and more embodied
knowledge to draw from.
One can easily imagine the potential of creating modular speculative urban
environments in which participants can explore to gain understanding of architectural and
urban proposals. Then, like MEML’s research, this hypothetical system could offer participants
the ability to manipulate and alter the design proposal based on their beliefs and desires. The
role of the designer, architect, or storytelling then becomes a more collaborative dialogue that
incorporates other perspectives.

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Of course, an urban space is not complete without other people. Linden Labs, the
creators of Second Life, are already working on creating networked virtual environments for
people to inhabit (Matney, 2017). Additionally, there is the potential of populating the space
with NPC (non-player characters) that use increasingly complex artificial intelligence
motivations and behaviors (McVeigh-Schultz et al., 2018). Though NPCs cannot replace the
experience of a socially networked space, they can provide an excellent base model for
exploring social interactions in a speculative space.
Virtual space is distinct because it holistically alters our perception of the physical
world. The medium provides the opportunity to inhabit other non-human entities (Google News
Lab, 2017; Ahn et al., 2016; Berenguer, 2007; Servillano et al., 2007) or “an opportunity to
rethink the body’s affordances in terms of alternative models of physics and causality”
(McVeigh-Schultz et al. 2018). Particularly when dealing with complex “wicked problems”
(Gaver, 2012; Zimmerman, 2007; Buchanan, 1992) like climate change or ecological systems,
VR can provide novel perspectives to making sense of the long-term issues. A number of
studies over the last 10 years at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab have explored
particular issues related to education and advocacy around environmental issues.
Ahn et al. (2016) found that there is a conceptual disconnect between individuals and
larger systemic issues related to the environment, particularly if those issues unfolded over an
extended period of time. But they found that when participants were able to embody a virtual
ecological being, they saw a profound change in their opinions. Especially when long-term
issues were compressed into a short timeframe for the virtual experiences, participants could
get a better sense of the causal relationship between systemic issues.
Another potential solution within the virtual space, is to offer the ability to shift between
the embodied and more macroscale perspectives. Experiences like Cosmic Sandbox (2011),
which is a massive simulator of the universe, could be explored in a virtual environment to gain

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a better physical sense of massive systems that are difficult to imagine from a human
perspective. Hypothetically, there could be a participatory VR game like Block’Hood (2016), in
which players create neighborhoods or cities with emergent behavior, but then are able to step
inside their own creation. Shifting from the macro to the embodied could uniquely situate
participants to link their top-down decision to bottom-up experiences through embodied
knowledge. Not only would participants imagine a future world, but they could inhabit that
world and get a sense of what it would be like to live there.

Conclusion

Envisioning the future entails a complex socio-technological assemblage and
interrelationship with audiences, design objects, and larger emergent systems. Such futuristic
proposals use aesthetic representations to inspire audiences by presenting potential, plausible,
or preferable futures, tapping into their fears and dreams. While certain representations use
grand spectacles (Hollywood science fiction films) or playful conceptualism (speculative
design), others speak in more subtle or mundane representations (design fiction). A balanced
approach is ideal, as the mundane may appear as mere practical proposal, while the
conceptual can be illegible, and the spectacular overly whimsical. World building is uniquely
positioned because it methodologically works out the minutiae of grand spectacles as well as
the socio-ecological systems where design objects reside.
We do not want to repeat the failures of modernism in planning for forms and systems
without thinking of the ground level human scale. But at the same time, our contemporary
wicked problems (Buchanan) are so massive in scale that they require a systematic
understanding to solve them. Video games and interactive media leverage computational
systems to create more complicated representations and simulations of emergent systems.

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Audiences and players can work through and test various approaches in order to learn causal
relationships and consequences of the system, mapping out the designers’ underlying
arguments. Ideally, the game would offer a bottom-up perspective as well to ground the
systematic approach at the level of the individual.
Virtual reality in particular offers the potential to incorporate the human body more
centrally as the interface itself, as the site of exploration and knowledge production. This could
afford the possibility of both creating a city from a god-like perspective and/or from the
perspective of inhabiting that city. The full perceptual immersion and active participation offer
simulations and situated learning that are more approximate to the actual fictional or proposed
world, shrinking the “experiential gulf” of speculative design and design fiction.
In the next chapter, I will look at more physical prototypes and experiences that are
performed in urban space. These projects are closer to reality, and create a greater sense of
understanding in the audience and more accurate contextual data of the given space.
However, it cannot be understated how important the envisioning process is for pushing our
imagination beyond what can currently be experienced or created with current material
resources. The role of future design and storytelling catalyzes new potential flights of
innovation by triggering dormant desires, fears, and affordances that reside in our current
world. It is then up to us to build, implement, and test these futures, discarding them to history
or making them our new reality.

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Experiencing nature: Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases
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Chapter 2: Building Spaces:
Urbanism, Mobile Technologies, and Tactical Media

Introduction

The City is … a repository of pleasures. It is the stage on which we fight our battles,
where we act out the drama of our own lives...The good city should be measured not
only by its distractions and amenities but also how it affects this everyday drama of
survival, work, and meaning.
- Charles Montgomery, Happy City (2013, p. 37)

The city is increasingly becoming the hub of global civilizations as a majority of the
world will live in metropolitan areas by 2014 (Sengupta, 2014). UNICEF estimates that by 2050,
70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas (MacDonald, 2016; Wilson, 2012). In the
US, the trend towards re-urbanization feels long overdue after half a century of neglect and
suburban sprawl. Today the experience of the city has become infused with technology as
mobile media becomes normalized and networked sensors and processors become smaller
and more powerful. Concurrently, people are striving towards sustainability and livability. The
individual freedom of the car, which has dominated urban design for roughly a century, has
become a prime culprit against the pedestrian pleasures of density and for the collective
responsibilities of pollution. Initiatives like “Everyday urbanism” (and “Tactical urbanism”) have
been developing to focus on small interventions that are particular to places and their social
practices. This is a radical turn from the last century of modernist urban planners and
designers that sought abstract, universal systems over the complex reality of the city. Starting
in the 1960-70s, theorist like Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau called for a shift towards
the practice of the everyday and the ways citizens appropriate and produce space in the city.

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Tactical urbanist techniques temporarily reappropriate or intervene in spaces to create
small design solutions to everyday needs. Large scale interventionist events from Critical Mass
and CicLAvia, to the Occupy movement show that the city can become a formative testing
ground for alternative modes of transportation and governance. These events are pushing the
“civic imagination” by inviting citizens to directly experience and test the possibilities on their
own. But while these moments are inspiring insights in another potential world, more work is
needed in order to implement large-term infrastructural or legal changes.
The city has also changed drastically through everyday technologies. Now with mobile
technologies, it is becoming increasingly easier for citizens to document, share, narrate, and
network their practices in the city. From these individual acts rise an emergent system of
behaviors and new protocols for public space. Combined with algorithmic tracking and
recommendation systems, smart phone-equipped consumers are re-writing the flows of the
urban environment - crystallizing nodes within a network of potential places. With a plentitude
of potential consumer options laid out in front of them, few will survive without an online or
hybrid presence. The future of nanosensors and hyper-reflexive “smart cities” will only intensify
certain feedback loops over others. With ever pervasive forms of computing, there lies the
potential to also manipulate the physical surroundings through computation. Augmented reality
and mixed reality provide further possibilities of either deepening our relationship with space or
further separating us and erasing users’ cultural context and environment.
Urban based technologies, games, and media must attend to the relationship of the
participant and the city. Rather than erase context, mobile experiences and urban games can
deepen engagement with history and place. Within art & media practice there has emerged a
field of “Tactical Media” in which media art, interactive systems and performances are used for
small-scale and temporary interventions. Like Tactical urbanism, the emphasis is on providing
audiences and citizens a momentary glimpse into another possible world. These experiences in

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turn inspire them to expand their imagination and create actions to move towards that
potential.
The combined forces of reurbanization, mobile media, and everyday urbanism have
offered a radical shift in people’s experience of the city and the possibility to create a
“participatory urbanism”. This paper will set the theoretical groundwork and explore projects to
help frame and map out what “participatory urbanism” might look like and what it can do for
reshaping the city.

The Second Dimension of Infrastructures of the Imagination

Moving beyond the first point of the imagination – the envisioning process, let us now
turn to building spaces and focus on the physical manifestation and implementation of new
design forms and urban configurations. While media and visual aesthetics are important for
creating a sense of wonder, defamiliarization, or provocative brainstorming, there persists an
“experiential gap”. As discussed in the previous chapter, the experiential gap refers to the
separation between the media representation of a design or storyworld versus the actual lived
experienced. In the final section of the previous chapter, I proposed virtual reality as a
prototyping tool to allow a greater sense of immersive fidelity and interactive exploration. Yet,
even with VR, there is still a gap between the real sense of public urban space - with its rich
and unexpected encounters and improvisations. Media rather is necessary for pushing the
limits of our imagination and representing that which cannot be feasibly fabricated in our
current moment, because of technological limitations or lack of financial resources.
In this chapter, I explore more incremental means for testing and prototyping designs,
either as new urban forms, playful reappropriations of space, and/or mobile stories that haunt
the city. Here, concepts become concretized into forms that engage with the public and

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wrestle with the heart of what it means to have a better life in the city. Many of the examples
and theories in this chapter are in contrast to modernist top-down approaches, which I
address shortly, that championed an idealized form over the lived experience. Rather, I present
bottom-up examples of tactical and playful approaches to the city that engage with the
pleasure of the city-goer at the human-scale. Ultimately, there are limits to tactical and
temporary urban projects, but they are urgently needed interventions into an ever increasing
privatization of public space and public life. The goal of short-term efforts, can lead to long-
term changes, as everyday citizens and government institutions witness and experience the
benefits of tactical urban changes – often designed for pedestrians rather than private cars.
Again, this is where envisioning also plays its part to dream of big systems alongside building
small designs in the street.
As we move towards the next chapter, which focuses on community engagement and
democratic participation, I want to focus increasingly on everyday citizens and their necessary
role in testing new design and new worlds. In this chapter, I will look at the Occupy movement
which directly experimented with and tested alternative forms of participation – such as direct
democracy rather than representational democracy – in a fascinating attempt to prefigurate
“another world” with more inclusive and radical structures for everyday citizens and
marginalized populations. These chapters and their arch may feel like a linear path, but really
the three dimensions should all exist simultaneously and feed into each other. The communal
and social are always present, just as the radically speculative and imaginative impulse should
underlie even the most quotidian design endeavors.

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I. Urban Spaces: Top-down Utopias Versus Everyday Space

A. Modernist Dreams: Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhaas

The dominant design ideologies of the last hundred years continue to be
constructed as essentialist architectural truths. Over and over again, experience
demonstrates that this type of truth-seeking precludes the vitality of urban
experience that inspired architecture in the first place.
- John Kaliski in Everyday Urbanism (1999, p. 90)

Modernist form and philosophies have a profound effect on our contemporary world,
especially in our urban environments. Modernists focused on formal simplicity that
championed efficiency and rationality over tradition or eccentricity. Through rational form and
design, complex global issues and cultural differences could become solved. But as Jane
Jacobs (1961) said, the modernist master planners were deluding themselves by creating
overly simplistic models of large, complicated systems. Creating urban space is not merely a
design or engineering problem, but brings with it other domains of social, cultural, legal, and
ecological issues. Within the design community, the term “wicked problem” (Gaver, 2012;
Zimmerman, Forlizzi, & Evenson, 2007; Buchanan, 1992) is used to describe multi-dimensional
and unsolvable problems. By not considering the contextual complexity, some large scale
modernist models failed under implementation (McCullough, 2004; Soja, 1989; Jacobs, 1961).
Urban housing and project buildings ultimately worsened livability issues by forcing a hyper
rational and dehumanizing order upon residents. Brasilia, Brazil - one of the most infamous of
planned cities - was created as a city with hardly any sidewalks (Robinson, 1990). This was
aesthetics and design without human consideration. Yet, such tendencies and beliefs persist

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today. The theories of Rem Koolhaas in particular represent a continuation of the modernist
erasure of cultural difference and context for the sake of simplicity and efficiency. But the
theories and designs of modernist were often well-intended, if not utopic.
One of the most iconic figures of modernism was Le Corbusier (birth name Charles-
Édouard Jeanneret). Le Corbusier was an architect, designer, urban planner, and painter. His
utopian concept of a “Radiant City” is a prime example of the conceptual and formal model
which modernism aspired towards. The “Radiant City” (Figure 12) was structured around a
perfect grid of roads, populated by giant apartment buildings which were surrounded by large
parks. Then around the apartment complexes were maze-like forms of office parks that also fit
neatly in the transportation grids. As John Kaliski (1999a, p. 90) states about the Radiant City,
“[in the] desire for utopian order, this vision simply did away with the situational rhythm of the
urban...With radiance, the problematic city of visible difference is replaced with an even more
problematic urbanism of unrelenting hierarchy.” The logic of zoning is taken to its extreme to
separate discrete types of institutions and their assumed related behaviors. In Le Corbusier’s
design (Figure 12), the bottom-up experience of the city becomes thoroughly forfeited for the
top-down efficiency of mobility and order.

Figure 12: The Radiant City design. Copyright Le Corbusier.

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Edward Soja (1989) claims this totalizing and essentializing tendency was a side effect
of a larger framework of European modernism which saw history as a straight sequential line.
Because history was a straight line, its future could also be mapped out and programmatically
designed through (social) sciences. Soja argues that space and geography became forfeited
for the blind, nearly essentialist, program of development around industrial capital and its
crises. Environmental and cultural considerations were eschewed for techno-historical
determinism.
Malcolm McCullough, in Digital Grounds, points to the Futurama exhibit at the 1939
World’s Fair as the perfect articulation of modernist projects towards totalizing forms, mobility,
and efficiency. McCullough (2004, p. 12) explains, the exhibit proudly proclaimed that “the true
poets of the 20th century are the designers, architects, and the engineers who glimpse some
inner vision...and then translate it into valid actuality for the world to enjoy.” He points out that
the Futurama exhibit was funded by General Motors and helped to usher in a new era of
automobile dominance in the urban environment. McCullough (2004, p. 13) remarks that the
net effect of such dominating models led to traffic engineers effectively being given “full power
over the form of the city.” Thus the car became a generative form in which modernist could
remake the city by finally realizing the dream of freedom, mobility, and totalization.
Before digging deeper into the effects of this period and the car on the shape of the
city, it should be noted that modernist concepts of urbanism persist, such as those of
prominent architect/designer Rem Koolhaas. In Koolhaas’s influential 1994 essay “Generic
City”, he shows that despite decades of critique, the modernist tendencies towards totalization
are still being perpetuated. Koolhaas argues that searching for preservationist, historical
narratives often has the opposite effect of transforming the original into some benign and

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uninteresting space, devoid of identity. Rather he claims we should celebrate the new hyper-
modern “Generic City” for its simplicity and modular repetition that creates new forms of
readability that are similar across global cities (Hansen, 2010; Koolhaas, 1995). The emphasis
on readability, or what McCullough (2004) calls modernism’s “project of transparency”, is still
heralded as the highest goals of design and architecture. The issues of cultural difference then
are completely wiped away in order to make a space that is recognizable and easily navigable,
regardless of origin or familiarity. Koolhaas favors new forms and designs that promote
accumulation and hyperactivity like theme parks, airports, and massive urban shopping
centers. But as Kaliski (1999, p. 101) contends, “in the city of a thousand voices, however,
unilateral design theories of any sort are doomed to failure.” In the utopian project of
modernism, the vision of the master planner/artist is often championed over the lived
experience of the city dweller. Living in Los Angeles, it is particularly clear that the dream of
efficiency and individual mobility - through cars - proves to actually stifle mobility and urban
pleasure.

B. Modernist Realities: Los Angeles and the Car

The imaginative history of Los Angeles is a record of efforts to improve upon Arcadia
without acknowledging that to interfere with a found or given natural paradise is to
introduce an element of dissatisfaction that can be eradicated only when the
transformation to a Utopia is complete.
-William Alexander McClung, Landscapes of Desire (2002, p. 12)

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When asked to describe or symbolize the city as a whole, the subjects used certain
standard words: “spread-out”, “spacious”, “formless”, “without centers”. Los Angeles
seemed to be hard to envision or conceptualize as a whole.
-Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960, p. 40)

Historian William Alexander McClung, in his book Landscapes of Desires (2002), claims
that from the beginning, Los Angeles was bound by two contradictory impulses. On one hand
there is the romantic past of Arcadia, an untouched Eden full of agricultural bounty. On the
other hand is Utopia, a dazzling future full of high technology that treats the landscape as raw
material for construction. The technologically-driven Utopia inevitably destroyed the idyllic
Arcadia, leaving a constant neurosis amongst the population who has come to Southern
California in search of one element or another. He claims these contradictions also play out in
the shape of the city itself which often is a layering of multiple cities and intentions. He goes on
to explain that, because the city itself is full of so many contradictory forms and cultural
enclaves, the interior of buildings and the single family home become the most fully realized
sites of utopic dreams and desires (McClung 2002, pp. 1-15).
McClung (2002, p. 33) claims that in general “Los Angeles did not so much grow as sell
itself into existence.” It’s initial days of early boosterism were wholly tied to the concept of
Arcadia. But the major developments of the city happened during high modernity and the
developing dominance of the automobile. In Happy City, Charles Montgomery (2013) points out
that there was a major turning point in the understanding of urban streets in the 1920s. Up until
then, streets were generally open for multi-use by pedestrians, children, trolleys, horses, and
early cars. As cars began to appear in higher numbers and higher speeds, so too did traffic
related deaths and accidents. Montgomery claims that more than two hundred thousand
people were killed in motor accidents in the 1920s in the United States. This called for

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immediate legal changes in the ordering of the streets. Montgomery (2013) argued that the
genius of auto clubs and car lobbyist is that they framed the issue as one of “controlling
pedestrians, not cars” (p. 71). The net result of this conceptual framework was that freely
crossing the street became a crime and gained the pejorative name “jaywalking”. Effectively
then the streets went from being an open, emergent space of transportation to one that would
thereafter be dominated by the dictums of the automobile.
It is no surprise then that Los Angeles’s car-centric design followed this new model,
especially considering that some of its fastest growth and development happened during this
period, as LA went from 576,673 people in 1920 to 1,238,048 in 1930 (Los Angeles Almanac).
Then between the 1930s and 1940s, Los Angeles became a hub for military and aerospace
manufacturing as well as auto manufacturing (the largest outside of the Midwest). Fueled by an
abundance of labor, petroleum, and federal subsidies for both defense and suburbanization,
Los Angeles was becoming a massive, sprawling complex of industry tied around cars and
airplanes. The final nail in the coffin was when Los Angeles began to gut its light-rail line, which
was once the largest in the world (Soja, 1989, p. 195).
The net result of the continued private development of suburbs combined with federally
subsidized highways was the creation of one of the largest and most sprawling cities in the
U.S. Margaret Crawford (1999, p. 20) characterizes it as, “Southern California’s banal,
incoherent, and repetitive landscape of roads is lined with endless strip malls, supermarkets,
auto-repair facilities, fast-food outlets, and vacant lots that defeat any conceptual or physical
order.” Los Angeles has become infamous for its sprawl, which often forces citizens to rely on
cars for basic practices related to life, leisure, and work.
Edward Soja (1989) however claims that the city is not incoherent from a larger
systematic perspective. He illustrates that labor was often organized around key regions:
aerospace engineers near LAX (then Ventura and Orange county), manufacturing industries in

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South and East LA, and federal and corporate headquarters in downtown LA. Rather the
highways helped to create borders between ethnic groups tied to these different labor forces.
For example, the I-10 Freeway separates the more black and industrial zones to the south
while the 405 safeguards the richer, more engineer dominated “surfurbia” that lined the coast.
Soja (1989, p. 246) goes on to claim, “when all that is seen is so fragmented and filled with
whimsy and pastiche, the hard edges of the capitalist, racist and patriarchal landscape seem to
disappear, melt into air.” The image of a fragmentary and nonsensical morphology then really
just masks the much deeper alienating construction of the city in which differing populations
are physically separated and far apart. The private dreams of freedom and mobility only then
become a tool for separating the public and deepening cultural/ethnic separation.

C. The Production of Space and Everyday Life

Societal memory uses physical landmarks, and this is what makes the city the repository
of civilization. Social recreation uses public sites for the presentation of self, for which
physical architecture sets the stage.
-Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground (2004, p. 28)

Space is populated by visible crowds of objects and invisible crowds of needs
- Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991, p. 394)

In 1974, Henri Lefebvre published the original French version of The Production of
Space. It was a radical call for a return to the everyday and away from the abstractions of
modern science, design, and philosophy. He claimed that on one hand scientists and
mathematicians had turned space into an abstract Euclidean space, while on the other hand,

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philosophers and linguists had turned space into discursive and mental space. What was left
behind then was a deep chasm that neglected the everyday, embodied experience of space.
Originally published in French in 1980, Michel de Certeau published The Practice of Everyday
Life (1998). He claimed that we can no longer view “everyday life” and its operations as the
“backdrop” of society. Rather, he argued that everyday life was a complex series of processes
that both reflect larger social relations and help produce them. Like Lefebvre, he was interested
in how urban systems ordered our lives and - more importantly - how people appropriate or
repurpose those systems for their own needs and desires.
Lefebvre claimed that things that conceal their origin become absolute. Overly
reductionist models (scientific ideology par excellence) are destructive in that they create
simplified abstractions, often used to mask the contradictions of the state. He claimed that
contemporary theories of urbanism and architecture are too obsessed with readability and
legibility, which in reality masks the space by providing over-simplified navigation that limits
potential action. He identifies the modernist trio of readability, visibility, and intelligibility as
conceptual models that conquer the physical and social experience of space (Lefebvre, 1991,
p. 92-93). Lefebvre (1991) was very adamant that the city is not a text and that “interpretation
comes later, almost as an afterthought. Space commands bodies” (p. 143). Cities are full of
linguistic symbols and legal codes, but they often mask the possibilities of space by defining a
limited criteria of actions. What they prohibit in the space is more important than what they
allow. The emphasis on visuality merely becomes the most dominant form of sensemaking tied
to knowledge and logic. The city was then abstractly redesigned under the weight of visuality
and language. He claimed language had become a violent, negative force that freezes the
creative acts of living and abstracts the world.
De Certeau similarly critiqued the ways that modernism used the planned city as a
disciplinary tool against the rich possible behaviors of people. De Certeau (1998) said that a

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planned city is based on the “fiction of knowledge related to this lust to be a viewpoint and
nothing more,” in which order is the ultimate goal (p. 92). The actual lived experience of
bustling, opaque, and blind mobility in the city presents something else. Despite his critiques of
abstraction, de Certeau often used language as metaphor to describe the ways that
pedestrians read and write the city. But he critiqued structuralism for emphasizing the written
word and the system over the actual enunciation and everyday usages of language. If the
planned city created a strategy of discipline, then he wanted to develop a “network of
antidiscipline” in the form of misuse and appropriation. He conceptualized walking as a space
of enunciation, that changes and defines the language of a city through drifting, improvisation,
abandonment or the transformation of spatial elements (1998, p. 98).
The artist collective Situationist International and Guy Debord, influenced by
discussions with Lefebvre, had already sought out processes of mapping the experience of the
city. Their concept of psychogeography and the process of the dérive (drifting) were attempts
to systematize an urban analysis that focused less on language and signs and more on the
ways that spaces command and direct bodies. The dérive was a data-collecting process. The
process was based on the idea that a person could suspend their normal goals and motives
and, “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find
there” (Debord, 2012, p. 50). He continues, “cities have psychogeographical contours, with
constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from
certain zones.” So by suspending the emphasis on pragmatic, rational navigation of the city,
one could uncover the ways in which the city’s form creates protocols for behavior and
movement.
Across the Atlantic, urban theorist/geographer Kevin Lynch was doing parallel research
(but with less radical rhetoric) to uncover the “environmental image” of pedestrians. Lynch
(1960) defines the environmental image as “a generalized mental picture of the exterior

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physical world that is held by an individual” (p. 4). In order to perform this research, Lynch went
out into U.S. cities to do extensive interviews. In addition, he had city dwellers and commuters
draw a map of their neighborhood, thus revealing the ways in which they conceptualized
space, the landmarks that stood out, and the traces they developed for crossing that space.
He found that people’s “environmental images” were often incomplete and inaccurate but
better represented the affective experiences about the more novel, painful, or pleasurable sites
of a place. Similar to Lefebvre and de Certeau, Lynch (1960) argued, “an environment which is
ordered in precise and final detail may inhibit new patterns of activity” (p. 6). Rather he argued
for a “surplus of clues so that alternative actions are possible” (p. 8). Like Lefebvre and de
Certeau, Lynch was advocating for a return to the richness of urban life that totalizing
modernist agendas had destroyed.
These theorists present a shift back towards the pedestrian level and the pleasure of
everyday citizens. By uncovering the psychological interpretations and improvisations, these
concepts and methods offer insights into the lived experience of the city. Rather than just see
the city as a blueprint of urban forms and infrastructures, urban design needs to equally
contend with the subjective and unexpected appropriations of diverse populations. In the next
few sections, I will continue to explore methods for implementing urban designs from the
bottom-up in order to test new formal designs and social dynamics within a given space. The
city is a dynamic, living system that sometimes needs short-term interventions in order to
uncover new potentials for long-term transformations.

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D. Dominated Versus Appropriated Space

A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential; indeed
it has failed in that it has not changed life itself, but has merely changed ideological
superstructures, institutions, or political apparatuses.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991, p. 54)

Despite Lefebvre’s dismal analysis of the modern city, he was still always optimistic
about the complex ways in which cities were negotiated and reclaimed. He argued that
abstract (techno-capitalist) spaces can never be totalizing. Rather it was wrought with
contradictions and fissures that opened up new “differential spaces” and offered room for
appropriation. His model contains three interlocked forms of space: 1.) dominated spaces that
are defined by state/capitalist institutions and highly rationalized forms, 2.) appropriated spaces
that are misused or reclaimed for the purpose of everyday culture, and 3.) co-opted spaces
which are the attempts of capital or the state to bring appropriated space back into the fray of
power and accumulation (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 138-139). To help illustrate this point, I will turn
briefly to an example in Los Angeles: The Arts District. This area was initially zoned and built
purely for warehouses, and shipping, neglecting any sense of social activity outside of
industrial and commercial transportation (Wagley, 2013). Then as large scale manufacturing
and production decreased, the district became increasingly blighted. Artists appropriated these
industrial spaces for large scale studios and galleries - thus giving it its name. As the area
became less dangerous and more popular (in tandem with downtown redevelopment), more
and more bars, restaurants, breweries, and businesses opened up. Now the area has become
a trendy “hot spot” (Wagley, 2013) and the buildings are being co-opted to create high-end
lofts and restaurants. Thus the process of producing space in a city is a constant flux of

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intermingled forces of power trying to regulate commercial activity or extract wealth from
cultural activity.
Lefebvre (1991, p. 385) argues that “leisure space” (or non-productive space) produces
a pedagogy of space in which people are able to explore alternative experiences outside the
realm of productive capitalist forces. Urban based games, art, and spectacles are thus
politically potent tools towards creating alternative systems and experiences of spaces (which
will be explored more in Section II-B, III-C, IV-A, and IV-B). Indeed, Lefebvre’s larger mission is
to think critically about how to produce differential spaces against the dominating forces of the
state and capital. As a former member of the Communist party in France, Lefebvre was critical
of the new Communist countries for their failure to produce a new radical form of space.
Rather he found that they, in particular the USSR, not only inherited the space of capitalism but
often exaggerated the forces of alienation in competing to create hyper-industrialized
economies (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 425). The production of space is the base for the production of
society.
Lefebvre is ultimately arguing for long-term strategies that institute real infrastructures
of changes and build new radical urban forms. De Certeau (1998), and many of the tactical
media and urbanism scholars that share his language, often romanticized the “tactical” as a
space for everyday appropriations and political interventions. Tactics are temporary because
they have no space of their own, no home-base to retreat to or to plan large-scale maneuvers
(p. 36-38). They must rely on quick interventions, temporary maneuvers against the dominant
powers that do control space. Lefebvre’s project is ultimately then a grander plan to strategize
the creation of one’s own space. This is the ultimate goal. But as we will see throughout this
chapter, multiple groups have identified tactics as a form to incrementally work towards new
spaces.

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II. New Urban Spaces: Tactical Interventions and Spectacles

A. Everyday Urbanism and New Urbanism

The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of
placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental
deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built
heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.
-Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter for the New Urbanism (2015)

In the last twenty years or so, new paradigms of urbanism have developed to try and
ameliorate the dehumanizing effects of the modernist city. “Everyday Urbanism” and “New
Urbanism” have stood out as two notable approaches and design principles for thinking about
the future of the city. While both practices seek to regain the pedestrian pleasures of the city,
their conceptual frameworks and processes are very different. New Urbanism has particular
forms of planned neighborhoods (Congress for the New Urbanism, 2015) that can be applied
to multiple different, disparate places. Everyday urbanism on the other hand is much more
relative and tied to a type of ethnographically-based design approach to working on smaller,
situated forms (J. Chase, M. Crawford, & J. Kaliski, 1999). New Urbanism is tied to long-term
“strategies” while the Everyday Urbanism is invested in “tactics”, identifying and reinforcing
local cultural practices of appropriating space.
As their Charter proclaims, New Urbanism is invested in creating sustainable, diverse
communities to overcome the ills of the modern city. Ironically, their “new” solution is very
much tied up in an older form of development. As Kaliski (1999a) describes, they aspire to
create, “villagescapes of carefully disposed individual buildings exemplifying small-town

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values” (p. 100). These are like planned communities in which there’s a central pedestrian-only
part of the village which contains the most important institutions. This safer pedestrian space is
also where parks and schools would provide adequate room for play and pedagogy away from
cars. Then in a concentric fashion, homes and streets for cars would be wrapped around the
central areas.
John Kaliski (1999a) is highly critical of this planned community. He claims that the
form, “replicates the multinucleated automobile suburbs built on open lading during the 1920s
without absorbing the consequences and lessons of the subsequent seventy years” (p. 100).
His concern is that, in effect, these micro-zoned enclaves will inevitably perpetuate the issues
of the modern city and only add a Band-Aid of pedestrian zones. Despite its radical claims, the
New Urbanist seem to be startlingly conservative. Nevertheless, it has become quite popular.
Kaliski (1999b) explains the popularity: “its preeminence among planners is simple. It provides
straightforward place-making principles that are imaginable, reassuring, and communicable”
(p. 217). The problem is that radical future forms are much harder to imagine than pre-existing
historical forms. Thus the “new” in New Urbanism merely becomes a reconfiguration of the old.
The “Everyday Urbanist” on the other hand seeks to work with particular people in
order to design unique forms that are tailored to place. Their work is not a totally radical
futurism either. They see the current forms of the city as a starting point. In the introduction to
Everyday Urbanism, Margaret Crawford claims that they draw inspiration from theorists like
Lefebvre and Debord but do not follow their radical trajectory. She (1999) explains, “they saw
both the society they attacked and the future society they desired as totalities. We instead
acknowledge fragmentary and incompleteness as inevitable conditions of postmodern life…
Our solutions are modest and small in scale - micro-utopias” (p. 10). So instead of seeking a
revolutionary space, they seek to appropriate space based on local needs and desires. Similar
to the rhetoric of Speculative Design, micro-utopias are seen as a temporary intervention into

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the possibilities of the future.
An important tenet of Everyday Urbanism is that it’s non-judgmental. Though they are
critical of suburbia and single-family homes, they are still respectful of their importance in the
public’s imagination. Kaliski (1999b) explains, “each [form] addresses a human need and that
all remain a subject for improvement rather than elimination” (p. 218). Because their process is
concerned with channeling citizen’s desires, they do not want to foreclose and pass judgement
on pre-existing forms of (sub)urbanism. The non-judgmental imperative runs even deeper and
also involves not passing moral judgement on behaviors and activities. It is fruitful to think of
community not as essentialized identity but as a cluster of practices. Paul Dourish (2004)
describes “communit[ies] of practices” as ones that, “share histories, identity, and meaning
through their common orientation toward and participation in practical activities” (p. 186).
Particularly when urban environments are often composed of intersecting identities of race,
class, age, and gender, the emphasis on common practices becomes a more fruitful way of
conceptualizing a place.
Walter Hood (1999) created a non-judgmental (but mostly speculative) project called
“Urban Diaries” in West Oakland. His process was structured around ethnographic work to
uncover the social practices and dynamics of a neighborhood and how to create design
solutions to best serve them. Some of the solutions were obvious such as creating new
playground designs for children who were using rusting equipment. Others were more novel.
For example, he proposed a beer garden in a park so that people drinking would do so out in
the open and rejoin the communal space of the neighborhood. Another issue he addressed
was that prostitutes would perform their services in cars out in the open where children could
possibly see. When he talked to members of the community, they were not so much
concerned with the prostitutes as the fact that children would be exposed to these acts. So he
proposed a covered area where prostitutes and their Johns could pull into, away from and

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unseen by children. Hood’s process and his designs argued that rather than attempt to
exclude certain behaviors it was better to find formal designs that best incorporated them into
the larger community dynamics.
In Stephen Duncombe’s Dream (2007), he critiques progressives’ tendencies to seek
moralist reforms (e.g., going back to Prohibition). Such reforms assume a behaviorist approach
to human psychology, in which the only way to create positive people is by eliminating
negative reinforcements from their environment. As Duncombe (2007) explains, “progressives
are all too fond of fashioning solutions that depend upon an idealized model of humanity to
work” (p. 34). Like the modernist city, the progressive paradigm depends on abstract and
unreasonable models of human behavior. Duncombe argues that though we do not have to
embrace all taboos and desires, we nevertheless must acknowledge and study them. The point
is that it is more productive to understand the desires and logics behind actions rather than try
to eradicate them wholesale. One of his examples is to analyze the “vernacular” architecture of
Las Vegas and how it speaks to a broader populist desire (pp. 30-31). By understanding
popular desires and “dreams”, activists and artists can envision futures that speak to those
ambitions and aspirations.
As we have seen thus far with Everyday Urbanism, their process seeks to design with
the vernacular of the neighborhood. As Crawford explained earlier, the designs are about
tactical appropriations of pre-existing forms. This process falls in line with a parallel effort
called “Tactical Urbanism” (Lydon & Garcia, 2015), which seeks to temporarily reclaim public
spaces to erect architectural structures or public events. As the book claims, it is a process of
“short-term action for long-term change”, and effectively argues for tactics as a form of
experimenting, testing, and planning for more permanent strategies. Tactical Urbanism (and
Everyday Urbanism) re-appropriates underutilized spaces in order to create better designs for
everyday life. One such underutilized site is the parking space. John Leighton Chase (1999)

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explains that, “each car in the United States claims four parking spaces, one at home and
three for other destinations” (p. 196). Despite the fact that cars were heralded as a tool of the
hyper-efficient city, they are in reality an extremely inefficient use of space. This is particularly
true as housing prices become increasingly unbearable; the system cannot be bogged down
by underutilized spaces to house underutilized cars.
In 2005 the group Rebar in San Francisco began a series called “Parking Days” where
they repurposed parking spaces in order to create “PARKs” and turn the spaces into playful
social places. The concept has since spread globally and even inspired official formal re-
arrangements like “parklets” (Chase, 199, p. 195). Currently the Los Angeles Department of
Transportation has an initiative to create Parklets (LADOT) across the city in order to take
parking spaces and revitalize them to become meaningful public spaces for people to
socialize, lounge, and enjoy the street. Another site of tactical intervention is to block off
redundant streets and create pedestrian plazas (In Chapter 3, I will discuss a community
project that I facilitated that resulted in a pedestrian plaza). Cities again have taken up this
tactic to create permanent plazas. The most iconic of such plazas is New York City’s Time
Square. Once a congested intersection surrounded by crowded sidewalks, the square has
been transformed to a public space for pedestrians to mingle and relax (Lydon & Garcia, 2015).
Recently, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) have adapted parking
spaces and redundant streets into parklets and pedestrian plazas (Figure 13). By simply
removing access to automobiles, the space was transformed into a pleasurable place for
everyday activities. Thus, innovation does not always have to be radically new but can be
found in reuse and appropriation, particularly when something is inefficient and does not serve
the greater common good of that area.

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Figure 13: LADOT parklet in downtown LA (upper) and a pedestrian plaza in Leimert Park (lower).
Courtesy of LA Department of Transportation.

The power of Tactical Urbanism is that it often requires few resources to transform a
space, but opens the imaginative possibilities for new strategies of spatial designs. Lydon and
Garcia (2015) argue that strategies and tactics, “should be used in concert with each
other...and can proactively address the tension between bottom-up and top-down processes

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by creating a better and more responsive environment for all” (p. 10). Rather than abandoning
strategies or relationships with the state, Lerner argues that tactics can be used to teach city
leaders how to better address community needs and create more equitable urbanism. Tactical
Urbanism then presents a process of scaling from temporary interventions to permanent
infrastructure.

B. Biking Spectacles for a New City

Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people
and fashions spectacles which give these fantasies form - a politics that understands
desire and speaks to the irrational; a politics that employs symbols and associations; a
politics that tells good stories.
-Stephen Duncombe, Dream (2007, p. 30)

Stephen Duncombe’s Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy
(2007) argues for large-scale tactics that incorporate collective dreams and desires. During the
height of the Bush administration, one of his advisors claimed, “we create reality” (as cited in
Duncombe, 2007, p. 2). Rather than creating a public discourse around facts and information,
Bush’s advisor admitted to the purposeful manipulation of the political imagination. The
deliberate use of misinformation has only been exacerbated with the current Trump
administration, which on its first day in office provided “alternative facts” regarding the size of
the inauguration (Sinderbrand, 2017). Stephen Duncombe wrote Dream within the context of
and in response to the Bush administration, pointing out that right-wing politics had learned to
tap into collective fantasies and desires. Duncombe argued that the Left had merely taken a
reactionary role, of moralistically policing the edges of factual reality and reminding people of

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the long term consequences of their individual consumer choices. Rather than police
populations, Duncombe argued that the Left needed to inspire people, tapping into their
dreams and presenting aspirational future.
Throughout Duncombe’s book, he highlights ongoing tactics and strategies for using
spectacle and storytelling to inspire people or to critique established power structures. In
particular, he points to examples of urban-based protests and mass organized activities.
Stephen Duncombe claims that large-scale (and usually unsanctioned) bike rides like Critical
Mass are “ethical spectacles” that are inspiring, progressive alternatives that invite
participation and are open to interpretation of meaning from both the riders themselves and
passersby. Critical Mass is an international monthly bike riding event (normally during Friday
evening rush hour) in which cycles ride in the streets to draw attention to the dominance of
automobiles. Duncombe (2007) claims that Critical Mass is a, “spectacle as estrangement --
creating an unreality that exposes the bizarre reality of everyday existence” (p. 156). Critical
mass rides reveal just how naturalized our car dominated spaces have become. These sort of
spectacles are not only inspiring but also informative as a way to test out systems and ground
them in the experience of the body through a type of situated learning. They open up new
relationships to the city and offer new insights into how urban space can be changed.
Moreover spectacles retain a sense of sensorial shock (akin to avant-garde art) through the
massive scale, theatrical otherness, and general openness to interpretation.
Critical Mass is an ethical spectacle for testing alternative transportation. I will later
discuss in greater detail how the 2011 Occupy protests were a nation-wide spectacle for
exploring alternative forms of governance and democracy. Critical mass and associated street
oriented spectacles are interesting because they point to a lively intervention in everyday life
which is moving - a transient, nomadic process of temporarily reprogramming (to use
architectural language) public space. Critical Mass started in the early 1990s, partially as a

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response to the First Persian Gulf War (Duncombe, 2007). The material realities of driving
petrol-fueled cars became increasingly politicized by the United States’ participation in a war
over the oil-rich region of the Middle-East. The politics of everyday life became a site for
intervention to draw attention to Americans’ oil consumption and willing participation in a
problematic global political system.
Part of this intervention was also deliberately tied to disrupting traffic during Friday rush
hours in San Francisco. By choosing a strategic time of day, critical mass would cause
maximum disruption in both a symbolic and real material sense. To many drivers, this
aggressive move was equally frustrating as it was revealing. As an ethical spectacle, there is a
spectrum of how open and inviting the experience actually was to those affected by it. But
since then, there has been a proliferation of bicycle rides, some smaller and more radical, like
LA’s Passage (Passage, n.d.) night rides, Kushtown Society (Carroll, 2015), or the Latinx anti-
gentrification group Ovarian Psycos (Ovarian Psycos, n.d.). These groups use biking not just as
a tool for reimagining the city, but reimagining social relationships and organizing around larger
systemic issues. Ovarian Psycos in particular have gained attention for their feminist, anti-
gentrification, anti-colonialism, and anti-patriarchy politics. Through news media and a recent
documentary (picked up by PBS), their tactics, iconography, and stories have spread to a
wider audience.
In parallel, there has been a large scale adoption of top-down biking events by City
governments. Ciclovía first started in Bogota, Columbia in 1974, where the mayor temporarily
blocked off the city streets for pedestrian and bicyclist. Then in 2010, Los Angeles launched
CicLAvia, which has become the largest “open street event” in the nation (CicLAvia, n.d.). But
LA is one of the newer cities, with other similar events happening for years across the U.S. and
the world. These events are sanctioned by the city and often involve multiple neighborhoods
being blocked off from car traffic for pedestrians and cyclists to reclaim the streets. These

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large-scale events point to an ethical spectacle that is truly inclusive and can offer everyday
citizens the opportunity to re-experience the city as one in which people reclaim centrality,
rather than cars. The events further represent the ways in which city leaders have adopted
Tactical Urbanism techniques to build consensus and work towards long-term strategic
changes in their city. The events are truly inspiring, and have had a massive impact on cities
like Bogota (Montgomery, 2013). The effects in Los Angeles, which only started in 2010, are
more gradual (US Census Bureau, n.d.). But nevertheless, it represents a top-down strategy of
creating a different culture and a different perception about a car-centric city and its potential
future.

C. Ride South LA and Healthy Food Map

Watts (and South LA) have changed dramatically since the 1992 riots. Local youth
initiatives, changing laws against gun and liquor stores, and better attempts at community
policing have all worked together (Kandel, 2017; Associated Press, 2017; Blackstone, 2014;
Morris, 2012) to make the place much safer than the mythologized place depicted in films like
Menace II Society (1993) and Boyz n the Hood (1991). Despite the dramatic outward changes,
inequalities still persist that are tied to the planning and opportunities of the neighborhood. One
such issue is community health, both in terms of accessible public space and healthy food
options. The Ride South LA (2012) and Healthy Food Map (2013) (Ride South L.A., n.d.)
projects are both attempts to construct systematic ways to address the issue of healthy food
access while promoting healthy, alternative forms of transportation. The two projects center
around creating alternative maps of bike/pedestrian paths and healthy food options in Watts.
Additionally, they have an added technological component of text-based system that
aggregates photos of riders’ experiences. These projects are instructive here because they lie

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at the intersection of technology and ethical spectacles that center around biking. The issues
of self-representation also move away from reframing identity through single media to create
systems and infrastructures that are open and sustainable.
As I will discuss more in the following chapter, infrastructuring (Karasti, 2014) has
become a term in Participatory Design (PD) for creating long-term collaborative structures that
build community capacity to create socio-technical systems. The process of infrastructuring
refers both to the designing of objects as well as the overall structure for maintaining
collaboration beyond the initial process of design. The Ride South LA and Healthy Food Map
projects are particularly strategic in their infrastructuring because they build upon previously
existing organizations and easy-to-use technology. They work within a hybrid space of digital
and physical, along with the hybrid mix of community bike groups, food advocacy groups, and
university labs. As the project website (Ride South LA, n.d.) explains, the complex collaborative
makeup includes “bicycle and social change advocacy, including T.R.U.S.T. South LA, the East
Side Riders Bike Club , Community Services Unlimited, C.I.C.L.E., Bikerowave and CicLAvia.
The Research & Development for this project was largely done by USC’s Mobile Lab within the
Annenberg Innovation Lab, the Metamorphosis Project, and MetaConnects.” The overall
assemblage is a socio-technical infrastructure that is built on pre-existing structures of
knowledge production, social exchange, material resources, and community rituals. In order to
most effectively envision and design the future - through world building or speculative design -
the team of designers should include collaborations with diverse groups that bring deep local
knowledge and social organizing.
While groups like the East Side Riders are clubs that have developed networks and
social rituals around cycling through Watts, groups like CSU and T.R.U.S.T. South LA have
developed healthy food gardens and distribution in the area. The role of the Innovation Lab and
Metamorphosis then is to create communication infrastructures for unifying these various

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groups and their work towards a larger issue and desire. The process of developing these
infrastructures is done in collaboration with the various community groups and through a
playful, hands on engagement with the technology and with exploring physical sites for
mapping. For example, one group of high school students went on a tour to explore sites and
begin to photograph and map out spaces they found valuable or interesting. The reflective tour
and the resulting photos represented a psychogeography of that place. The process was a
form of playful pedagogy (Lefebvre, 1991) and exploration that focuses on the role of the body
and cultural values in relation to urban systems. The photos were then uploaded online and
helped to feed into the final production of the map. The community participants learn critical
framings and procedural processes for rethinking the design of urban space as well as the
political power of crowd-sourced systems of self-representation.
The end result of the map became a document of complex knowledge production that
is then accessible and easily distributable. During the bike rides, public participants were also
told to take photos along the ride that stuck out to them. Public participants are often diverse
groups that represent a mix of people from within and outside of the neighborhoods. Their
photos showed how different groups found value in their environment. They also spread to
online networks and created a hybrid of the physical space with digital spaces. The cellphone
photos that people text in then create an ongoing archive for both documenting and
broadcasting the route and the experiences to be had along the way. The bike rides
themselves are in some ways the most important element of the process. The bike rides
become “ethical spectacles” that draw attention and raise questions from passersby and locals
along the bike path. Rather than merely abstractly reference or suggest the need for greater
bike access in a car-dominant city like LA, these sort of large scale rides perform and represent
what a more bike-centric LA might look like.
So while these events are still tactical in their spontaneity and performativity, they

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create an infrastructure for long-term collaboration - particularly by scaffolding their work upon
pre-existing organizations and efforts. Moreover, their use of mobile technology points to ways
in which physical spaces become hybridized and momentary events spread across networks
(Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013). The simple and technological solutions become generative,
translating years of organizational work into systems that can serve an open audience and
expand across networks. As I will argue throughout this dissertation, systems are important. As
we move towards Tactical Media, which often exposes or undermine dominant systems,
community organizing points to ways in which alternative systems can be created to engage
sustainable practices that outlive individual projects and excitingly await the future.

III. Hybrid Spaces: Mobile and Environmental Technologies

A. Mobile Phones and Networked Spaces

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent in search of a
proper. The City [is]...a network of residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian
traffic, a shuffling among pretenses of the proper, a universe of rented spaces haunted
by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.
- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1998, p. 103)

As mobile phones become increasingly pervasive, they create new relationships to
space, information, and other people. It is important to think about the ways that media can
talk to each other and draw new connections across systems or various types of spaces
(digital and physical). The rise of mobile and ubiquitous computing has created a paradigm

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shift in how we understand networks and the internet. The initial conceptual frameworks, from
academic research to popular cyberpunk films, established network computing as a separate
virtual sphere not tied to physical space. But as Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva
(2011) put it, “we don’t enter the web anymore; it is all around us” (p. 3). This transformation
has changed the way that design research works as well. Paul Dourish (2004) states that
research now is in a process of “responding to the challenges of computation that inhabits our
world, rather than forcing us to inhabit its own” (p. 17). No longer are we tied to the desktop,
nor to interacting via a mouse and keypad. Now digital technologies are in the environmental
surroundings or increasingly utilizing touch and gesture controls. In effect this transformation of
inputs “draws on...the ways we experience the everyday world” (Dourish, 2004, p. 17). The net
result is more human-centric forms of interaction. On the other hand, now that technology
inhabits the physical world it must contend with the complex formal and social practices of its
surroundings.
The practices of mobile phone usage and their functions aren’t entirely alien to urban
social spaces. As Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011) are quick to remind us, networked
devices are not merely an invention of Apple or Blackberry, but “emerged out of
experimentation and exploration of our very real desire to locate and be located” (p. 41). There
is always a concern of surveillance and privatization, but networked, location-based
technologies are part of a larger desire towards making sense of the environment and our
social position within it. They now merely enhance and complicate our ability to draw meaning
and establish identity by being constantly networked to a larger global sphere of information
and people.
Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Firth (2013) claim that, “locations, however, are
not isolated entities. They are relational, and their meaning derives from their ability to develop
connections to other locations” (p. 36). Locations derive their meaning from their similarities,

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differences, and connections to other places. And as Lefebvre, de Certeau, Jacobs, and Lynch
have argued, space is not a container but derives its meaning from the types of social activities
and cultural exchanges of a place. Networked technologies merely create additional layers of
social activities, cultural exchanges, and relational meanings.
There have of course been push backs. A lot of critics claim that global networks are
destroying local sense of place and space. David Uzzell goes so far to say it’s a “virtual crime
against humanity” while others say it is an “absent-presence” in which people are there but not
there (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011, p. 85). Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva (2011)
contend that normalized urban space has already been mediated by both technologies (cars,
streets lights, signs, etc.) and by social norms of selective attention. They refer to Goffman’s
concept of “going away” in which people take a momentary escape from social situation
without interrupting dominant activity (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011, p. 94). For example,
reading on a train has been a normal practice for over a century and equally involves removing
oneself from the dominant involvement in space. Their point is that people are constantly
juggling between “dominating” and “subordinate” rituals in order to limit cognitive, attentive,
and affective exhaustion. Mobile devices just provide a more complex and nuanced way to
engage with space and transition between its various social rituals and points of attention.
Not only are mobile users often juggling multiple social rituals but they are also juggling
multiple temporalities. A citizen might be in conversation with one person while intermittently
texting to make plans for the future with another person (hopefully not excluding the former).
Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011) again state, “net localities are spaces where one can shift
their attention outside of the physical situation, because the situation is understood to be larger
than what is physically near” (p. 93). So the technology allows more intricate activities within a
given situation by allowing wider ranges of spatial, temporal, and informational extensions into
the world.

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All of this does not mean that we should embrace mobile technologies blindly and
wholeheartedly. Rather it suggests that we should not rely on such simplistic binaries of private
vs public and attentive vs distant. These definitions exist on a spectrum as people, devices,
and urban infrastructures interact to create the complex dance of daily urban life. There are
definitely larger social and political issues that come with this relationship to technology and
space. I’ll analyze those more thoroughly in the upcoming sections. But for the moment, I shall
first develop a more thorough analysis of the ontology of bodies in relationships to mobile and
pervasive computing interfaces.

B. Mobile Interfaces and the Body

We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain
indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions
to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought...We think with the objects we love;
we love the objects we think with.
- Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects (2011, p. 5)

In Jason Farman’s Mobile Interface Theory (2013), he establishes the concept of
“sensory - inscribed” body as a means to join phenomenology and post-structuralism. On one
hand, he argued that phenomenology taught that all engagement with the world is embodied.
On the other hand, post-structuralism revealed how we read other bodies and how our body is
inscribed with meaning. Therefore the “sensory-inscribed” body is one that engages the world
through embodied cognition and is tied up within a cultural matrix of others both creating and
reading symbols/signs. As Farman (2013) explains, it is “[an] understanding of the body that is
not only conceived out of a sensory engagement across material and digital landscapes, but

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also incorporates socio-cultural inscriptions of the body in these emerging spaces” (p. 13). The
sense of the body is tied to specific places, spaces, and cultures that create it and the body in
turn recreates that culture.
In regards to technology, Paul Dourish (2004) explains the concept of a “community of
practices”. One of the core tenants of his concept is that one’s actions must appear to be
appropriate and meaningful to the community in order to be a member. Dourish (2004) used
the phrase “observable and reportable” to explain how a community member’s actions must
be available and read as meaningful to other members of a situated practice (p. 79). It is
important to recognize that the role of the body in social and technological environments is not
merely to read but also to be read.
Dourish takes this point further to explain that technological devices, as extension or
augmentations to actions, must thus also be legible. Both Dourish and Farman are highly
critical of “interfaceless interfaces” – or interfaces that disappear into the background - that are
often implicit goals in the construction of ubiquitous computing environments. Farman (2013)
claims that “the ‘interfaceless interface’ of pervasive computing carries with it the threat of
exercising hegemony by receding to the background and avoiding critique” (p. 29). This point
is dire in thinking about the increasing privatization of urban space and how such pervasive
computing could deepen and extend these potentials. Architecture already programs so much
of urban space. The effect would become even more profound once infused with networked
computing that can communicate to your device.
Farman argues that it is important for interfaces to draw attention to itself and
communicate its processes. He refers to Heidegger’s concept of “ready-to-hand”, where the
tool disappears and becomes an extension of the body, versus “present-at-hand”, where the
tool is recognized as a discrete object (Farman, 2013, p. 79). He argues for designs that
reinforce the “present-at-hand” model rather than one in which the tool becomes invisible. We

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must always be aware of the device and the behaviors it affords because mobile media and
pervasive environments are infused with the social world. Objects and technological interfaces
that become naturalized create new social relationships and assemblages that become
naturalized as well. Some design theorist, such as Carl DiSalvo and Bjorgvinsson (DiSalvo,
Lukens, Lodato, Jenkins, & Kim, 2014; Björgvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren, 2010) use the term Thing
(with a capital “T”) to draw attention to the fact that technologies do not exist as isolated
objects but are created by and create socio-material assemblages. Drawing from Bruno Latour
(Latour, 2004; Latour, 2005), these designers highlight the ways in which all design is inherently
social and must be understood in terms of its affordances and consequences for those within
its sphere of influence. Farman is thus calling attention to the logics and mechanisms by which
this social influence takes place.
For Dourish, the issue of invisibility is less about the nefarious invisible workings of the
system than it is a pragmatic issue. As Dourish (2004) explains, “invisibility is not engaging;
invisibility does not communicate. Invisibility and the design influence are somewhat at odds”
(p. 202). He argues that the point of design is to communicate, both in terms of its functions
and its underlying systems of values. People must be able to understand a design or system in
order to engage it meaningfully and usefully. He says the biggest issues with most interfaces is
that they use a single abstraction that masks the more complex processes. His ideal system is
a form of “computational reflection” that communicates the activities of the system. Not only
would the system represent its activities but those representations themselves would be
closely related to the activities (Dourish, 2004, p. 85). Thus, the interface could use naturalized
input processes or easily read metaphors for linking representations to actual action and
processes.
Again, action must be made meaningful, especially as they’re used by different
communities of practices. Dourish (2004) argues that different communities of practices inhabit

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space in different manners. One space can be arranged the same way but its rituals and
appropriate actions could be vastly different. He compares a large academic lecture hall versus
a concert hall. Though the spaces have similar physical forms and constraints, their usage is
governed by social norms and practices (p. 89). Malcolm McCullough argues in Digital Ground
that we should move away from a performance model of computing to one that focuses on
“appropriateness”. As an architect, context is extremely important and he uses a “situated
action model” to analyze how people’s habits and goals work within or against a given
institutional or physical framework (McCullough, 2004, p. 52). By understanding the various
competing actions and desires of a space, the designer can create a wider array of possible
reconfigurations that are open for appropriations.
Much like the work of everyday urbanist, McCullough’s argument situates the process
of appropriation as a central feature for the possibility of urban and architectural spaces. This
idea is in contrast to the Modernist notion of a totalizing space, with predetermined spaces for
specific programs and communities. Rather than rationality, space is designed for relationality.
Dourish and McCullough point to the ways in which ubiquitous computing and technologically
infused spaces could increase the modularity of space, morphing and changing dependent on
the current inhabitants or public configurations.
Moreover, McCullough (2004) claims that, “interface designers have emphasized first-
time usability at the expense of more satisfying long-term practices” (p. xiv). In attempt to
create universal interfaces and systems, designers have forfeited more complex possible uses
in the future. Dourish equally claims that the point of legible systems is to understand them and
make them available for reconfiguration. As different communities and spaces require different
functions, that evolve over time, then their systems should be able to be flexible enough and
legible enough to evolve with those practices.

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Another key element that McCullough establishes is the role of the unconscious in our
experience of space, cognition, and systems. Like Lefebvre’s critiques of the modernist city,
McCullough claims that too much attention has been placed on visible readability over
embodied intuition. McCullough (2004) proclaims, “our embodied predispositions have been
underfed while our foreground deliberation attention has been oversaturated” (p. 50). This has
important consequences, particularly in information rich environment, when one is trying to
process and navigate vast amounts of information. McCullough’s argument for unconscious
environmental systems complicates Farman’s argument. It is a difficult task to both create
interfaces that reveal the underlying logic while making interactive systems that are natural and
unconscious. How can one maintain critical attention while trying to spare the limited resources
of conscious attention? The unconscious mechanizations cannot be “invisible” (as Dourish and
Farman both critique), but natural enough to incorporate embodied engagement that does not
demand conscious awareness.
Katherine Hayles points out in How We Think? that an important process in design is to
identify the scarcest resource. Today that resource is human attention, as we try to make
sense of the increasingly massive amounts of information. Based on then-recent cognitive
psychology studies, she claims attention is often supported by the unconsciousness (or the
“new unconscious” to not be confused with Freudianism) which helps us manage excess of
sensory information. Hayles (2012) explains, “the unconscious does not exist primarily as
repressed or suppressed material but rather as a perceptive capacity that catches the
abundant overflow too varied, rich, and deep to make it through the bottleneck of attention” (p.
14).

So rather than assume that humans make sense of the world purely through rational
consciousness, Hayles argues that the unconscious actually guides much of our experience in
the world.

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Hayles goes on to explain how technology also helps to augment our cognitive
potentials by extending them out into the world. Hayles (2012) states, “embodiment then takes
the form of extended cognition, in which human agency and thought are enmeshed within
larger networks that extend beyond the desktop computer into the environment” (p. 3). No
longer is the computer tied to the desktop and no longer is cognition tied to solely to the body.
For Hayles, technology has developed in a form of co-evolution which has enabled us to
extend our control farther and farther into the world.
Indeed, in another article on RFID technology, Hayles discussed the ways in which
information intensive environments create a system of “distributed cognition.” Hayles (2015)
explains this is a “shift of vision that enables us to see these sub-cognitive and non-cognitive
processes as not just contributing to conscious thought but themselves acts of interpretation
and meaning” (p. 117). The physical environment then goes from being a stable pre-given to
something much more complex, procedural, and automated. Our presence within the system
becomes less central as reconfigurable processes perform beyond our conscious control, or
awareness. Taking serious Farman’s and Dourish’s earlier claims about “interfaceless
interfaces”, this model seems dangerously obscured. But Hayles’s larger point is to rethink
human cognition’s relationships to technology, particularly as we push the limits of our brain in
more information rich environments. Pervasive computing then offers an ability to unload
embodied cognitive labor onto a distributed network of sensors and processors.

C. Mobile Histories and Polyvocal Traces

We can no longer depend on a story-line unfolding sequentially, an ever-accumulating
history marching straight forward in plot and denouement, for too much is happening
against the grain of time, too much is continually traversing the story-line laterally.

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-Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (1989, p. 23)

34 North 118 West (2002) by Jeff Knowlton, Naomi Spellman, and Jeremy Hight is one
of the earliest locative narrative projects. Set in the Freight Depot near downtown Los Angeles,
the project used a GPS-enabled Tablet PC to deliver chunks of audio stories that were tied to
specific positions of the user’s body. The stories were set in the turn of the century and were
semi-fictive tellings of the experiences of the train yards. It was an attempt to catch the spirit of
that moment in which trains were “synonymous with power, speed, and modernization” (34n
118w, n.d.). The story also represents the drudgery and danger of working with such massive
machines. One particular story was about a night watchman who had to try and stop suicide
attempts of people jumping into the trains. The project creates multiple layers of history in
revealing both the utopic associations and the dark realities of industrial progress.
The layering of historical narratives also parallels the layering of space as participants
walk around the present empty industrial space, looking for clues and traces of the past. The
experience offers a haunting in a space in which you’re free to wander. Gordon and de Souza e
Silva, talked about the rich power of “situated learning” in location based games and stories.
Rather than presenting images and texts within a classroom or theater, these projects provide
“learning activities [which] can be situated in actual, relevant contexts” (Gordon & de Souza e
Silva, 2011, p. 73). Moreover, the process of embodied learning taps into more unconscious
and haptic forms of knowledge production and meaning making that deepen the engagement
with the space and the narrative.
This is not to say that narratives are not themselves important to cognitive processes.
Indeed, Katherine Hayles (2012) claims, “narrative modes are deeply influenced by the
evolutionary needs of humans negotiating unpredictable three-dimensional environments
populated by diverse autonomous agents” (p. 179). As Hayles points out, narratives

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themselves are conceptual frames and sequential devices for making meaning and drawing
relationships between the complex natural (and human-made) world around us. What is
fascinating then about distributed locative narratives is that they allow a more active
construction of the narrative sequence. Rather than following a linear path, the wondering form
of locative narrative allows a participant to hear a story in relationship to particular places
rather than a preconceived fashion. The listener is active in both the process of discovery as
well as creating sequential meaning out of the distributed bits of narrative.

D. Mobile Stories in Institutions: Livingverse and Memory Cellars

History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as
well as collective praxis.
-Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (2014, p. 102)

I created two mobile stories that sought to hybridize or intervene in academic
institutional spaces: Livingverse (2009) at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) and
Memory Cellars (2013) at the University of Southern California (USC). Both projects used
mobile tablets to lead guests on audio-visual tours of university buildings. At both universities,
my programs (MFA and then PhD) were moving into new buildings. The lack of institutional
history and personal traces created a space that felt like a blank canvas. In Livingverse (2009)
the goal was to use mobile video stories to draw attention to how social media created a
hybrid space tied to ongoing global political issues. In Memory Cellars (2013), I created a
speculative story about the future of privatized academia, using an app with a 3D model of the
building to create a one-to-one relationship with the viewer (Figure 13). Both projects utilized
binaural audio to create highly spatialized audio experiences. Both stories were nonlinear and

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depended on the viewer to actively explore the space to choose which narrative sections to
experience, creating their own sequential meaning.
For Livingverse (2009), I had just completed a feature length documentary about
personal video and documenting state violence. The project explored the complicated tension
between memory, media, and power. The documentary traced the trajectory of video from
Rodney King’s LAPD police beating in 1991 to Oscar Grant’s shooting by a Bay Area Rapid
Transit (BART) police officer in 2009. The film explored the ways in which personal video had
proliferated globally to shift viewers' proximity to experiences of political violence - such as the
Iraq War (2003-2011) and political upheaval in Iran in 2009. Personal video represented a
potential alternative perspective to witnessing state violence, one that was both physically
intimate to events and symbolically outside sanctioned media representations.
By translating this project onto a mobile device, which is the site of both producing and
consuming personal media, I wanted to more directly address the relationship of the viewer
and the documentary subject. As Bill Nichols (1987) states, one of the fundamental questions
about documentary film is “how to represent the human body as a cinematic signifier in a
manner commensurate with its status in the ensemble of social relations” (p. 9). Rather than
explore the power relations and position of the documentary subject within the act of a film
production, the mobile project addresses the role of the everyday audience as consumer and
potential producer.
Participants were given iPads (first generation) to explore the building, as pre-recorded
video showed them where they were supposed to be going - matching up to the architecture
of the building. Binaural audio sounds of footsteps were used to help unconsciously pace their
progress and signal moments to stop. Then throughout the piece, videos of personal footage
of state violence (Rodney King, Oscar Grant, Iraq War, and 2009 Iran uprising) would play,
matching up architectural features and perspectives to the audience’s position around the

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building.
The matching of the participant’s perspectives to those of the handheld cameras within
these acts of state violence, inculpate the participant as both witness and possible subject. As
witnesses, they call upon their own memory of the original context in which they perceived the
mediated events. As subjects, the embodied performance calls into question their own
possible responses, as wielders of prosumer media to witnessing state violence or police
brutality (as Oscar Grant was only a few hours north of UCSC in Oakland). The project acted as
an experiential bridge for imagining the material possibility of political intervention into acts of
state violence.
It was also a reminder of geographical separation that still persists despite the sense of
intimacy with personal videos and devices. During the mobile experience, participants run
through an Iraq War combat zone with visceral audio-video, only to then stop and look out
onto the peaceful institutional surroundings. The affective immersion into the dangerous world
of the cinematic scene is only more profoundly transformed then into a sense of absence in
these moments of pause. The project created an experience that immersed participants into
multisensory representations of political violence only to then ease out into moments of self-
reflection. The active navigation of the built environment and intruding sounds, also created
another dimension of self-reflexivity that drew attention to the interface as “present-at-hand”
(Farman, 2013).

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Figure 14: Memory Cellars: 3D overlay of building with branching stories. Photo by Karl Baumann.

In Memory Cellars (2013), the project deepened the tension between pre-recorded
audio content and the unique surrounding sounds of everyday activity in the building as the
user explores the space. Rather than focusing on the fragmenting of space of global media,
Memory Cellars explored slippages in time and potential futures of that particular USC building
(Figure 14). Released on the opening of the new building, the science fiction narrative is set in
2063, during the 50th anniversary of the building. In this future, universities have become
research facilitates owned by massive technology companies to produce new patents and
proprietary information. The building is owned by Mem Cell corporation, which runs the largest
archive of information and specializes in cutting-edge research. One of their research labs,
“Imagenetics”, has been developing an experimental drug to augment human cognition but it is
rumored to have extreme adverse side effects. But because Mem Cell owns the research
archives, they own what is and is not published.
Participants used iPads to follow along the branching storylines by walking through the

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space and triggering audio snippets. To orient themselves, a 3D model was created to match
their perspective with the actual building. Utilizing the iPad’s gyroscope and accelerometer,
Memory Cellars was able to more precisely measure and represent the participant’s position
throughout the piece. Participants were able to roam freely throughout the building; or they
could follow two competing narratives: the official tour guide or the conspiratorial research
assistant. With a balance of Disneyland populism and digital humanities skepticism, the project
leveraged immersive fiction to spark ethical questions about the future of information
economies and academia.
The project used the science fiction strategy of “cognitive estrangement” (Darko
Suvin's term discussed in Chapter 1), in which stories exaggerate features of our contemporary
world to draw attention to their constructed or problematic nature. Similar to defamiliarization
strategies found in speculative design, tactical media, and avant-garde art, Memory Cellars
uses the power of mobile storytelling to layer narratives to contrast and question the dominant
assumptions of the academic institution. In a shift from the documentary critique of
Livingverse, Memory Cellars utilized fiction to push the audience’s imagination to explore
possible futures in order to critique our contemporary world and the seeds of such potential
outcomes. By focusing on the future, science fiction addresses the consequences of ongoing
activities and invites the audience member to trace the process of such change. Rather than
outright address the increasingly dominant position of private companies (like Google) in
research access or the defunding of public universities, the project reveals the world created
by these processes.
The role of the audience’s own imagination is central in completing the narrative and
allowing ambiguity for their personal interpretations. Because the tour told most of its story
through audio and a few images, it was up to the viewer to complete the visual contours of the
described world. Rossitto, Barkhuus, and Engström (2016) explains in regards to mobile audio

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stories, “imagination emerge[s] while looking for casual relationships between scenes and
place” and that another level emerges through “activities ongoing independently of the audio
drama” (p. 255). The mobile story invokes the participants’ imagination to envision how the
fictional story can take place within that location. Then another dimension is added by any
ongoing activity in the location, which creates new real-world social dynamics for the
participant to imagine in relation to the story.
By situating the participant within a given space, the mobile experience provoked them
to project the storyworld onto the building. Again, the building was new and felt like a blank
canvas will no traces of history. It was a space full of potential and thus ripe for speculatively
exploring. As Candy and Dunagan (2016) argue, “for future studies to impact mainstream
culture and contribute to civilisation-scale “social foresight” it must be capable of bridging the
“experiential gulf” between abstract possible futures, and life as it is directly apprehended in
the embodied present” (p. 1). They argue for an “experiential turn” in which embodied
interactions with objects or spaces - outside of abstract language or passive story
consumption - foster deeper insights into potential futures. The ultimate product of such
experiential engagement is not the event itself, but inspiring participants to support or create
better futures. The Memory Cellars project was intended to provoke audiences to think
critically about the future of academia and support knowledge production for the common
good rather than private interests.
In both Memory Cellars and Livingverse, I created interactive components for
participants to record their memories. In Livingverse, there were stations on each floor, where
people left stories about their experience witnessing state violence - either on TV or mobile
phones. They discussed how these memories are still vivid, as the events punctuated their
everyday life. In Livingverse, the questions were built into the mobile application, asking
participants about their thoughts on the topic or predictions of the future. Some participants

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discussed their imagination of the future, while others discussed how many future predictions
did not come to pass - like flying cars. The goal of the audio recording for Memory Cellars was
to create a living archive that would collect thoughts and stories leading up to the 50th
anniversary of the building. However, due to technical feasibility issues, this has not been fully
implemented yet.
Both mobile projects created nonlinear and active stories that incorporated the
participants’ bodies in the process of sequential and interpretative meaning making.
Participants’ story experiences were never exactly same as they chose different story
combinations whose meaning was influenced by whatever social activity was happening in that
space during their experience. With Livingverse, the mobile device itself was a central
component of the project’s analysis and critique. In Memory Cellars, the device was a glimpse
into an imagined future that haunted the space’s potential. While both projects sought to
incorporate participant’s stories and thoughts into the final piece, there is still more work to be
done. But we can look to certain participatory locative media or the genre of urban games to
find examples in which participants generate the content and final outcomes of the experience.

IV. Hybrid Play: Mobile and Urban Games

A. Playing with Others: Locative Media and Urban Games

If Lefebvre is correct in his belief that the creation of new spaces has the ability to
change social relations, locative games must address history, lived experience, and sit
in order for both participant and designers to learn how to produce something better -
another city, another space, a space for social equity and change.
-Mary Flanagan, Critical Play (2009, p. 207)

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Critical Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke (2007) enhances the experience of urban space by
allowing participants to record and leave stories as they ride their bikes around London. In its
most basic underlying system, the project is a game of hide and seek. While riding, you can
“hide” and record intimate stories in response to one of the programmed questions, like ‘tell
me about your father.’ The stories are then geotagged to the position in which the individual
records them. Or you can “seek” and use your GPS to find other people’s stories. Critical Blast
Theory (Blast Theory, n.d.) summarize the intended experience, “as you roll through the streets
your focus is outward, looking for good places to hide, speculating about the hiding places of
others, becoming completely immersed into this overlaid world as the voices of strangers draw
you into a new and unknown place. The streets may be familiar but you’ve given yourself up to
the pleasure of being lost.” The project creates a poetic metaphor for the city as participants
become increasingly aware of the invisible network of stories that haunt urban environments.
The project also creates various levels of intimacy and personal enclaves within the vast
open public spaces of the city. The intimacy of the voice becomes an escape from the
anonymity of the city, especially once listened to with headphones by another player/rider.
Rowan Wilken (2013) draws from Agamben’s “workless community” to explain how the work of
Critical Blast Theory offers systems for creating new configurations of community that are
“open to the Other” rather than presumed or presupposed (p 185). Wilken claims that
community forms through processes of communication - usually broken away from their
professional milieu - to find new potentials for recognizing and respecting the radical difference
of others. So the project not only changes the experience of space but also of the general
relationship to others in the city. Since the project is not designed for players to meet in
person, the hauntings of voices maintain their utopian potential as the listener imagines what
that other might look like.

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As seen with Rider Spoke, game rules can create great generative systems for people
to navigate the city differently and experience novel forms of human interaction. The only
concern though is how these games play out once positioned within the larger social realm of
the city, particularly when other players are not easily identified. The exchanges with a stranger
could be pleasurable or they could be alienating. It all depends on the rules.
Cruel 2 B Kind (C2BK) was a locative game developed for the “Come Out and Play”
festival in New York in 2006. The game was played by small teams of assassins who receive
texts about what strategies of attacks they had to perform on other teams of assassins. These
strategies though were acts of kindness like “help someone across the street” or “compliment
their appearance”. Throughout the game there is always the potential to “attack” a passerby or
pedestrian. But since the rules called for acts of kindness, the net effect would ultimately be a
rather pleasurable experience. Mary Flanagan (2009) is slightly critical of the game because it
creates acts of kindness based on competitive drive to win and not on an actual desire to be
nice. Nevertheless, if the acts of kindness are read as such, and not as a competitive game,
then the results are positive - or at least not negative. At worst, it is just a momentary
annoyance to New York pedestrians. A kind word or act could still lead to a more elaborate
discussion or spontaneous relationship.
However, Flanagan and Farman both point out other examples where the accidental
inclusion of pedestrians turned out quite negatively. Flanagan (2009) points to a game called
Prosperia (2006) in which players had to pull pranks on random strangers, one of which
included a priest (p. 206). Eventually people in the area called for the game to be stopped
because it triggered unwanted and alienating behavior. Jason Farman (2013) tells of the game
Momentum (2006) that took place in Stockholm. It was a complex and immersive locative live
action role playing (LARP) game which involved costumed actors that were scattered around
the city. At one point a group of players was supposed to meet a transient character at a park.

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But the players became lost and arrived late to the park after the actor had already left.
Instead, there was an actual homeless woman at the park who they, under the guise of the
storyworld, assumed to be part of the game. After a series of awkward miscommunications,
the woman passed out. The players then proceeded to go through her bag and steal some of
her money, because they felt it was in line with the characters that they were playing (Farman,
2013, p. 75-78). This unfortunate outcome one of the issues with allowing the game space or
“magic circle” to become dominant over the real social context in which it’s being played.
While leisure space and play offer the ability to rethink urban spaces, there also lies the
potential to erase cultural context. Again, this further points to the necessity of community or
local engagement - if not collaboration - for artists and designers working in public urban
spaces. These spaces are negotiated and tangled in complex histories of social life and cultural
identity. Ideally, there is a balance needed between playful, fictional, and speculative
appropriations of urban spaces and their possible future, with the deeply weighted and
contested past of that space. Nevertheless, like tactical urbanism, mobile stories and urban
games offer a space for interventions and reimagining of our cities. Or, as I will analyze in the
next section, these forms also offer the ability to create novel and playful ways to bring history
back into the present, lived experience of a neighborhood.

B. Locative Game for Urban History: Sankofa Says

In 2014, as part of my collaborative team The Leimert Phone Company ([Figure 15]
which will be elaborated on in Chapter 3), we created a large urban game called Sankofa Says
for the IndieCade gaming festival. While many games overlay fictional worlds onto the built
environment, our project sought to deepen festival attendees’ relationship to the cultural
history of their surroundings. Culver City was the location of the festival from 2009-2015, which

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included a massive outdoor “arcade” in the center of the city as well as additional events in a
nearby firehouse and old power plant. Because of the centralized location and abundance of
activities, much of the international crowd did not venture far and had limited exposure to the
historical richness of Culver City.

Figure 15: Foundational unveiling of repurposed payphone with part of team. Photo by Wesley Groves.

Culver City, a legally separate city in the middle of Los Angeles, was the home to some
of the largest classical era films, such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), King
Kong (1933), and Gone with the Wind (1939). It was also the location of Howard Hughes’s
WWII plant, where he famously built the “Spruce Goose” transport plane. Yet, this rich and
iconic history is not apparent whilst traveling through Culver City nor attending the game
festival. In response, we created an urban game that would lead players to historic sites
around Culver City, ask them to physically perform or recreate historic scenes (Figure 5), and
then text the photos into an automated system. Players and the general public could keep

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track of activities and the overall scoreboard on our website.
Players gained points depending on whether they answered history questions correctly
and based on how many other players checked in with them to send in photos of their physical
recreations. By incentivizing players to form larger groups, the game nudged the participants to
reach out and talk with strangers. Like Wilken’s (2013) analysis of Critical Blast Theory, the
game used play as a strategy for strangers to form “workless communities” around activities
outside of their professional milieu. Similarly, Lefebvre (1991) describes “leisure space” (or non-
productive space) as a place for producing a pedagogy of space, in which people can explore
alternative experiences not tied to capitalist forces. Rather than experiencing the neighborhood
for the sake of consumption (bars, restaurants, stores, etc.), the players sought collaboration
and “situated learning” (Gordan & de Souza e Silva, 2011) of the area’s history. Though the
players were given extrinsic motivations tied to the point system, there were no real stakes.
Rather, players were driven by intrinsic motivations of playful collaboration, urban navigation,
and historical education.
Indeed, the process of recruiting strangers became increasingly elaborate throughout
the game. The game was designed to use the player’s physical performance and historical
recreations as a form of Duncombe’s “ethical spectacle”. The performances were in public and
open, both inviting participation in a leisure space that embraced local history. But as we
played the game for multiple days, the entire process evolved. We initially created signs on red
wooden sticks to designate locations for tours and historic sites. But the players began to
appropriate them as protest signs, leading chants through the streets, like “Play our game.
Play our game.” These chants then evolved to incorporate history lessons. During the filming of
the Wizard of Oz (1939), the munchkin actors were all kept in the downtown Culver City hotels.
Because of their relatively smaller size (and lack of labor protection), they had no choice but to
sleep 3 to a bed, laying horizontally (NPR, 2007). This became a rallying cry, as our players

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shouted “One Munchkin. One Bed.” and other chants advocating for Munchkin rights.

Figure 16: Sankofa Says: players answering history riddles (upper), players recreate scenes in public
spectacles (below). Photos by Karl Baumann.

The history of the neighborhood became a playful, living spectacle that inspired people
to find novel forms of acting out in public space. Drawing from Eric Zimmerman’s (2007)
concept of “transformative play”, Duncombe describes how lived games offer participation and
improvisation that build skills and change a player’s perspective of the world. Rather than a
sign or a plaque, players performed history and invited others to participate. Once the players

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gathered (as a “rally”) to a historical site, they collectively answered trivia questions through
their mobile phones (Figure 16). Then they were prompted to act out scenes from movies
and/or symbols associated with Culver City’s historical buildings. Players in any given rally did
not form teams against each other, but collaborated to brainstorm iconic movie moments or
symbolic gestures of history. They then sent in the photos to be posted onto our website,
which tracked and publicly displayed their activities.
By mixing the hybrid space of online activities and physical engagement, the players’
activities spread across networks (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013). Even the Mayor of Culver
City tweeted about our game to her networks. She posted, “When history comes to play” with
an image of our “Vote for Lucy for Mayor” sign. (Lucille Ball was honorary mayor of Culver City
in 1958 [Masters, 2012]). Through our own site and social media, the physical spectacle of the
game enriched the historic urban space, bringing it to life and creating a playful hybridity.
Rather than erasing the particularities of the space, the smart phones deepened public
engagement and made visible the historical traces of the city.

V. Hybrid Politics: Tactical Interventions and Prefigurative Occupations

A. Tactical Media

In its most expansive articulation, tactical media signifies the intervention and disruption
of a dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs,
messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible.
-Rita Raley, Tactical Media (2009, p. 6)

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Similar to the work of tactical urbanism, “tactical media” seeks temporary interventions
and appropriations to create alternatives or expose flaws in current systems. With tactical
media, the interventions are in hybrid physical-digital urban spaces or popular media
landscapes. Associated with the “Next 5 Minutes” conference in Amsterdam and the writing of
Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), tactical media is not tied specifically to art but uses “any media
necessary” in order to achieve political and interventionist goals (Next 5 Minutes, n.d.). CAE’s
early definition was particularly keen on examples of participatory, amateur, and guerilla-style
use of media for political interventions or to give voices to the voiceless. Eric Kluitenberg (2011)
argues that with the proliferation of personal media, the concept of tactical media has become
both diffused and democratized. He claims that citizens’ access to media has allowed the
formation of counterpublics and everyday representations outside of dominant media spaces,
which ultimately reduces the political necessity for tactical media. However, Rita Raley’s book
Tactical Media (2009) points to the ways in which the underlying principles of tactical media
have persisted within art and media production, becoming more nuanced and complex in their
use of digital technology and hybrid spaces.
Drawing from the avant-garde tradition of disruption and defamiliarization, tactical
media is about momentary, performative works that open up space for critical consciousness
or utopian thinking. Tactical media functions within the parameters of global capitalism through
disruptions, interventions, and reappropriations to reveal systems of dominance or offer models
to counteract them. Rather than an autonomous art that lives within gallery and market spaces,
tactical media functions by using public spaces and the social world itself as part of the
medium. Drawing from de Certeau, tactical media is about appropriating dominant spaces
(digital and physical) and intervening in the everyday.
Rita Raley claims that these new tactics are tied to new configurations of power in a
post-industrial or information society. She calls on Deleuze’s definition of the “control society”

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to elucidate her formulation of current systems of control. Deleuze’s notion of the control
society is one that is infinitely flexible and reconfigurable; as opposed to Foucault’s disciplinary
society which was based on central institutions that replicate their particular forms of power
within individuals. The control society is characterized by ubiquitous surveillance, more
effective forms of data mining human behavior, and invisible boundaries (passwords) rather
than concrete institutions (Deleuze, 1992). Power functions in a much more flexible, invisible,
and unstable form. Equally, resistance can take place on a number of flexible fronts,
reconfiguring as interventions in media space, public streets, or everyday workplaces, rather
than just being massive organizations.
The Yes Men are an example of a simple but effective technique for repurposing the
power of dominant media systems to reveal the underlying beliefs and power structures. The
activists-cum-pranksters duo of Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (or Mike Bonanno and Andy
Bichlbaum) have become notorious for posing as corporate and political leaders or
representatives. In 2004, they posed as Dow Chemical representatives on BBC and claimed
full responsibility for the 1984 chemical spill in Bhopal, India. In 2006, the pair went to a World
Trade Organization (WTO) meeting and proposed “Slavery for Africa” as a groundbreaking
economic model. Or in 2007, they paraded as an Exxon executive who was proposing a
substance called “Vivoleum” which would take human bodies that were dying from
environmental disaster and turn them into usable fuel (Keim, 2007). Even the most incredible
claims are still given momentary attention precisely because they appear as generic, articulate
white men in business suits who assume a position of power. In each instance, they gain
power from the particular social context or institution. The ease in which their generic
characters can fit into these spaces exposes the seemingly unaware or unreflexive systems of
dominant discursive spaces. Moreover, their claims are often partially grounded in reality or
push reality to the logical breaking point to reveal its inherent flaws.

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The work of the Yes Men fit into a larger tactic of “culture jamming”, in which artists and
activists repurpose communication systems to subvert the original intended message. Culture
jamming (Dery, 1993) is identified with earlier practices of the Billboard Liberation Front in San
Francisco in 1977, who would repurpose billboards to comically critique advertisements and
corporate messages. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, they changed a radio promo billboard
from “Hits Happen - X-100” to “Shit Happens. Exxon”. The practice of re-appropriating
billboards and advertisements has continued to evolve with famous artists and organizations
like Banksy and Adbusters. As we will discuss shortly, Adbusters, which is an anti-
consumerism Canadian magazine, was instrumental in organizing the Occupy Wall Street
Movement. But what “culture jamming” and the Yes Men have in common is a tactic of
reappropriation that uses humor to engage audiences and undermine, subvert, and reverse the
conceptual meaning of corporate rhetoric.
Stephen Duncombe, in Dream (2007), explains this technique as a “charade [that]
highlights the falsity of our supposed reality” (p. 47). The tongue-and-cheek nature of such
charades is transparent (particularly after the fact) and thus “doesn’t treat its audience like
suckers” but rather satisfies our needs to be educated and to be entertained simultaneously.
Duncombe claims that jokes are inherently social because they’re often incomplete and
demand audiences to close the meaning making process. Thus, they create a narrative
interdependency which invites participation and non-hierarchical artist relationships
(Duncombe, 2007, pp. 131-132). Also, jokes often are not literal but rather use “metaphor and
conceptual categories”, two elements argued by Cognitive Psychologist and Political
Philosopher George Lakoff to be central in cognitive processes for making sense of the world
(Duncombe, 2007, p. 10).
Writing around the same time as Duncombe, Ian Bogost’s Procedural Rhetoric (2007)
often draws heavily on Lakoff’s notion of “conceptual categories” or “conceptual frames”. In

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retrospect, it seems that all three authors were grappling with the fallout of Bush’s re-election
and the unreality of continued “Global War on Terror” (p. 100-104). Bogost and Duncombe
both claim that the result of the 2004 election revealed the large ideological split in the US and
the power of representation over reality. Lakoff (2010; 2004) helped formalize theories as to
how cognitive-linguistic systems enabled these two realities to exist. For example, he
emphasizes how republicans were good at “shifting frames” or rephrasing issues to speak to
ideologically conservative beliefs. Through something as simple changing “global warming” to
“climate change”, the effect is not only to shift the discourse but the whole conceptual framing
of it.
Conceptual framing is a useful term in thinking of how art works to defamiliarize
audiences (particularly when tied to linguistic or symbolic systems) in order to change their
framework of particular issues. The role of symbolic and conceptual framing is particularly
complicated when making sense of large-scale violence and war. Both Iraq wars were
perpetuated by a strategy of masking and dehumanizing those victims of the war (Butler, 2016;
Sturken, 1997). The war could only persist if the US public did not see the Iraqis as humans,
and did not relate to them as individuals. So it was the task of tactical media artists and
practitioners to subvert this strategy, taking advantage of new technology and hybrid spaces to
rehumanize the war.
Paula Levine’s Shadows from Another Place: San Francisco <-> Baghdad (2004),
Alyssa Wright’s Cherry Blossom (2006), and Waffa Bilal’s Domestic Tension (2007) all take on
issues of representing the Iraq War by centering the position of the body in their conceptual
frames. Levine and Wright attempt to make the participant feel vulnerable by relating the
distant conflicts to the localized experience of public urban space. Waffa Bilal, an Iraqi-
American artist, places his own body in the position of vulnerability in order to explore
Western’s position of indifference or power.

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Cherry Blossom (2006) was a project created by Alyssa Wright (Wright, n.d.) at MIT in
Cambridge, MA. As a participant walks around Boston with a backpack containing a GPS
receiver, information fed live from the Iraq Body Count Database triggers a C02 cannon in the
pack to fire a burst of confetti into the air, with each piece listing the name of an Iraqi civilian
killed during the war. The use of an informational database combined with the GPS receiver,
gives a systematic structure to the piece, which as Rita Raley (2009) points out, “cannot fail to
invoke the high-precision bombing afforded by weapons systems such as the JDAM, air-to-
surface smart munitions that contain GPS units” (p. 101). The unexpected blast of the
individual wearer then grounds this systemic representation into a very visceral experience and
affective understanding of these issues.
Shadows from Another Place: San Francisco <-> Baghdad (2004) similarly attempts to
‘bring the war home’ by overlaying a map of Baghdad over San Francisco in order to build
empathy by provoking participants to imagine their own local spaces and institutions
destroyed. The interactive online map itself has additional information of both the real bombed
sites in Baghdad and where they would imaginatively land in San Francisco. Additionally, there
were geocaches left at the different places in San Francisco that corresponded to the map.
Emotionally loaded places of everyday life become reframed as sites of potential conflict. So
like Cherry Blossom the role of GPS in the urban environment becomes central, and then is
further abstracted and broadcasted through the website. By drawing direct parallels to the two
urban spaces, the project changes the conceptual frame of the war from a distant desert land
to a modern metropolis similar to our own.
Domestic Tension (2007) is also about creating empathy and critiquing the dominant
mass media representation of the war, which often focuses on dehumanizing the enemy. But
rather than focus on the public space of the urban environment, Bilal’s project is performed
through and critiques online, networked spaces (Bilal, N.D.). Bilal confined himself in an art

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gallery for 30 days, under 24-hour surveillance of the webcam, while participants could speak
to him through a webcam. They could also remotely control a paintball gun to shoot him; which
was connected to the webcam program. He was interested in working through the dichotomy
of the virtual versus the real (already a lingering conceptual framework of the 80s) by exposing
the ways in which virtual creates a sense of innocence or at least a lack of culpability for the
consequences within the real. The project was no doubt partially inspired by video games of
the time that glorified American militarism. Huizinga’s (2008) “magic circle” – the conceptual
separation between game spaces and real life - here offered a safe space for participation and
a powerful sense of control over the Bilal, particularly considering the often anonymous
participation.
Bilal’s technical system was relatively simple but it was scaffolded atop the pre-existing
systems and cultural norms of the online environment. In a sense it was a social experiment to
let the network play itself out. The users’ responses varied and showed the complex reactions
and degrees of sympathy. Many people shot Bilal and unabashedly proclaimed their pleasure
in doing so. Mary Flanagan in Critical Play (2009), points out though that many players began
to “unplay” the game by creating teams to save Bilal by continuously pointing the gun away
from him and deterring would-be assassins.

The social dynamic revealed the much larger
complex processes of consensus building, particularly across diverse, networked populations.
It proved that indeed the sight of his physical confinement, meant to conceptually parallel the
experience of Iraqis under US siege, was unbearable and demanded empathy. It was effective
in constructing an alternative, tactical system for intervening in the dehumanizing construction
of the Iraqi other.

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B. Another World is Possible: Occupy Everything

Unlike that of the short and medium term, the terrain for such future-oriented struggles
is not the state but the autonomous, self-generated networks of movements themselves,
spaces for the generation of alternative practices, codes, and values that have the
potential to both aggregate and migrate into wider spheres of everyday life.
-Jeffrey Juris, “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere” (2012, p. 274)

The Occupy movement (2011-2012) is a fascinating political upheaval that ties multiple
theoretical and practical threads of this chapter together. Occupy was the embodiment of: (a)
Lefebvre’s theories of appropriating space (Figure 17) beyond privatized and capitalist systems
(b) Duncombe’s ethical spectacle that engages a mass public to experiment with new forms of
social relations, and (c) the use of hybridized space and tactical media that connects physical
place with social networks and global media. The umbrella of events associated with the name
and tactics of “Occupy” spanned many months of occupying central urban centers across the
globe, from the U.S. to China, Israel, South Africa, and more. By the end, occupy
encampments and protests had popped up in every continent (except Antarctica). It presented
a truly global phenomenon that represented a long history of structural issues and a new world
of networked technology.
The complexity and cultural specificity of all of the loosely connected occupations is
beyond the scale of this section (and probably the expertise of this author), so I will be focusing
specifically on Occupy in the United States. (Full disclosure: I participated in multiple protest
actions and assemblies in Occupy Oakland.) But it is important to note the international aspect
in Occupy’s theoretical and tactical genesis. The Occupy movement developed through
inspiration from the 2009 occupations in Egypt’s Tahrir Square (and the larger “Arab Spring”

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protests) as well as parallel student occupations in universities in the UK and the California
University system. The 2011 Spanish Indignados occupations in mid-May of 2011 also helped
to re-energize the concept. On September 17, 2011, Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti
park in the heart of Manhattan, after an Adbusters’ call to action (Schwartz, 2011). From there,
occupations began to spring up across the U.S. and the world, with protests intensifying in
October and November. The last of the major occupations (Washington DC and London) were
cleared by February 2012 (Quinn & Johnson, 2012).

Figure 17: Occupy Oakland occupying the seaport during a “general strike”. Photo by Karl Baumann.

One of the most distinctive features of Occupy was the very act of appropriating space
for extended periods of time and creating temporary communities - cities within cities - to
experiment with alternative social possibilities. Within the Occupy tent cities, there were
medical tents, libraries, media centers, faith centers, and more (Juris, 2012). As Neary and
Amsler (2012) argue, Occupy represents Lefebvre’s concept of a pedagogy of space. Rather

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than leisure space which playfully circumvents means of capitalist production, occupying is an
explicit undoing of capitalist logics and private property. By creating alternative spaces outside
of capitalism, Occupy offers a space of exploration and experimentation for the general public
- or the forming of counterpublics. Indeed the term “Occupy” is itself an appropriation of
military terminology (much like de Certeau’s use of tactic and strategy). Rather than being
occupied by a dominant military force, Occupy was reclaiming space for those
underrepresented or oppressed. Occupations were strategically placed in centers of power -
dominated spaces - within the city that were controlled by economic or state institutions. In
New York the occupation took place in Zucotti park, in the center of Wall Street, while in Los
Angeles and Oakland it was in front of city hall. In each instance, their symbolic positioning
resulted in a very, real physical interruption to those in power. Then the occupations formed
mini-societies to create alternatives to those institutions’ belief systems and processes.
The most central systems that Occupy were trying to critique were the economy and
democracy. The movement was a product of a variety of deep-structural social and political
issues, but was triggered by the economic fallout of the 2008 market crash. Not only had the
fallout intensified economic disparities and individual precarity, but the governmental
responses further punished those struggling (through austerity plans) while bailing out
economic elites (like wall street banks and the auto industry). So it was not just a crisis in
global capitalism but also a failure of democratic governance. As protesters began to set up
tents and encampments, they created alternative systems and structures for democratic
participation and collaboration.
As a form of “ethical spectacle”, Occupy created an open space for diverse
participation and experimentation. The protest marches were sites of theatrical and mass
movements, spaces where one could lose sight of the individual ego as they move with the
crowd (Tuan, 1977). Within the camps themselves, there were weekly General Assembly

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meetings, which attempted to model direct democracy rather than representational
democracy. Everyone was invited to speak and give proposals. The crowd then used hand
signals to agree, disagree, block a notion, or ask for clarification. The hand signals were a
quick visual way to represent collective opinions without words. The goal of each assembly
was for full participation and to reach total consensus. As Hardt and Negri (2011, p. 3) suggest,
the heart of the Occupy was movement was to experiment with “real democracy”:

[T]his emerging cycle of movements will express itself through horizontal participatory
structures, without representatives. Such small-scale experiments in democratic
organizing would have to be developed much further, of course, before they could
articulate effective models for a social alternative, but they are already powerfully
expressing the aspiration for a "real democracy."

Much like how a game is based on rule sets, so too are civic structures of participation.
The rules create a procedural system that represents the core underlying beliefs and generates
social practices and rituals for participants to perform those beliefs. Drawing from Barbara
Epstein’s “prefigurative politics”, Duncombe (2007) argues, “the vision of the future is
prefigured in the practice of the present, thereby erasing the distinction between means and
ends” (p. 171). The General Assemblies (GA) were an attempt to create a microsociety that
gave participants an opportunity to feel empowered and participate through a horizontal,
leaderless structure. One of the critiques of this process of course is that it is very time-
consuming. Duncombe himself critiques “spokescouncil” meetings (which inspired the GA)
because they are time consuming and certain individuals still try to dominate the open system
of participation. Nevertheless, he claims the experience of participating in such processes
speaks volumes and offers insights to the possibilities as well as limits of direct democracy.

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Rather than abstractly argue for such systems, massive participatory assemblies provide
testing grounds for figuring out alternative social relationships and political systems.
Indeed, Neary and Amsler (2012) argue that “Occupy was explicitly pedagogical at it’s
core” and that “there are a number of working groups dedicated expressly to educational
questions (e.g., the Empowerment and Education Group - a hub for Occupy University,
Student Debt and Forum on the Commons)” (p. 6). Juris (2012) also gives his example from
Occupy Boston, that there were, “workshops, including “An Introduction to the Solidarity
Economy,” “Neoliberal Dispossession and the Demand for Demands,” and “Whiteness and
Ally-Ship,” were scheduled throughout the day” (p. 262). So the Occupy movements
represented a diversity of tactics for providing knowledge through alternative formats, outside
of dominant institutional space. Coupling explicit educational workshops with experimental
forms of participation provided the general public a place for relearning space and its
intersection with civic and economic systems.
The Occupy movement also represented a fascinating intersection of horizontal
decision making coupled with networked technologies. As Hardt and Negri (2011) explain,
“network instruments do not create the movements, of course, but they are convenient tools,
because they correspond in some sense to the horizontal network structure and democratic
experiments of the movements themselves. Twitter, in other words, is useful not only for
announcing an event but for polling the views of a large assembly on a specific decision in real
time” (p. 302). Social media acted not just as a form of direct communication but represented a
diverse population of perspectives and activities. Juris (2012) discusses that Listservs were
often used to organize events and protests for early anti-capitalism and anti-globalization
protests in the 1990s-early 2000s. Social media presented a new, less centralized
communication structure that move beyond specific Listserv subgroups and entered into the
digital spaces of everyday life.

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While Manuel Castells (2015) calls Occupy a “a network movement”, Juris argues that
the use of social media represented something more complicated. Juris (2012) argues that
“logics of networking” represent connections of different organizational nodes linking together
to plan a single protest. Occupy rather represents a “logic of aggregation” because of the
sheer diversity, improvisational participation, and horizontal decision making (p. 260-261). The
occupation of public space over a long period of time allowed for the aggregation of diverse
populations far reaching outside the normal activist networks. Then the use of social media,
which are much more public facing than specialized political online community spaces, further
spreads information across diverse discursive and social arenas.
The diversity of participation represents a broad range of groups that would often not
identify with each other politically or culturally. Juris (2012) cites a survey from Occupy Wall
Street in New York that found “just under a third of respondents identified as Democrats and
another third did not identify with any political party. Meanwhile, 5 percent identified as
anarchist and 6 percent as socialist, independent, and libertarian, respectively (Schoen, 2011).”
Historian WJT Mitchell (2012) expands the scope in discussing the international diversity as
well. He claims, “In Tahrir Square the Muslim Brotherhood camped next to Coptic Christians,
radical fundamentalists, secular liberals, and Marxist revolutionaries. Right-wing Zionist settlers
joined the anti-Zionist ultraorthodox along with secular Jews on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel
Aviv, and Tea Partiers showed up at Occupy rallies across the US” (p. 11). The openness of the
Occupy movement and related international occupations represents a space for blending and
aggregating multiple communities and belief systems. While certain networks expanded,
others co-existed in parallel of each other. The protests were not unifying in their message, but
rather their discontent for the dominant political systems. The diverse claims and political
messages existed alongside each other, even if there were fundamental disagreements.
The diversity of messages were then spread and picked up by a diversity of online

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social media and even dominant media spaces. Groups formed around certain issues and
found solace in protestors representing those issues. Rather than a single narrative or
representation, networks spread in multiple political directions across the spectrum. For the
first time at such a massive scale, individuals were able to use their personal technology to
document and share events. In my own experience of Occupy Oakland, I would often follow a
live broadcast if I could not be there in person. Certain channels like Occupy Oakland on
UStream present embedded, “amatuer perspectives” of the unfolding event, creating a hybrid
space between the protesters around them and the viewers online. As certain images and
videos became viral - especially footage of police brutality - they would be picked up and used
by dominant news sources. Especially as police began to clear encampments and remove
protests, footage was spread through news coverage to large public populations. These would
then inspire increasing participation and public protests. By the end of 2011, most of the
encampments had been cleared, with the last ones removed by February 2012. After months
of occupations, the massive assembly of people had been removed. Because of the lack of
demands and the diversity of groups participating, there was an uncertain sense of the final
political accomplishment.
As Williams and Srnicek argue in Inventing the Future (2015), the Left has become
overly tied to tactics of temporary interventions, because of fears of hierarchical structures,
bureaucracy, and anything else that resembles the State. They argue for a long-term strategy
that works towards building systems - even within current political mechanisms - in order to
impact real change. They point to theories of neoliberalism and how calculated strategies lead
it from a radical economic theory to a series of think tanks to eventually becoming the
ideological bread and butter of the most powerful country in the world. What began as an idea
was strategically developed to influence key figures and invading the political thinking and
“civic imagination” (Jenkins, Shresthova, Gamber-Thompson, & Kliger-Vilenchik, 2016) of

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major leaders. While I am not advocating for social engineering of this sort, the emphasis on
long-term strategy is necessary for moving from the realm of ideas to built objects and
experiences to systems and infrastructures. This level of realistic planning can still be achieved
by starting from a conceptually imaginative and future-facing place.
This chapter has largely focused on temporary interventions, but the ultimate goal is for
long-term solutions and strategies (not just tactics). In the terms of de Certeau, strategies are
long-term practices because they are driven by those who possess space and power. Tactics
are temporary because they are performed by those who do not. How do we establish spaces
for democratically-driven strategies? Williams and Srnicek’s example of neoliberal think tanks
points to the ways in which building intellectual networks over time can affect public policy.
Can we create networks of community-driven design labs that experiment both with forms of
participations as well as aesthetically rich visions for the future of their neighborhood? How can
Occupy point to more long-term “occupations” and reappropriations of space for the sake of
testing new forms of social being?
It is difficult to truly measure whether Occupy was effective in creating real change in
the American political system or imagination. In the end, the phrase “99% versus the 1%” was
incorporated into larger public discourse (and later by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders)
to represent the extreme income inequality in the U.S. and abroad. For many participants in
Occupy protests and assemblies, this was their first time experiencing and engaging with
protests or leftist collaborative systems (Juris, 2012). It was a radicalizing and transformative
experience that pointed to alternatives to dominant forms of political and economic structures.
The openness of movement attracted a diverse participation and did not value one ideology
over another. Moreover, as a horizontal political system, it refused to elevate leaders as
representatives. As Mitchell (2012) points out, the image of occupy is the crowd, the multitude
(Figure 6) and not of single individuals. He argues that the Occupy Movement, “insisted on an

152
iconography of nonsovereignty and anonymity, renouncing the face and figure of the
charismatic leader in favor of the face in and of the crowd, the assembled masses” (p. 9). It
was conceptually inconceivable that Occupy would transform into a series of representatives in
the U.S. political party system (like the Tea Party had earlier). Occupy was a focused on long-
term structural changes that fundamentally were against current corrupt, representational
systems.
While the lasting influence of Occupy on American politics is questionable, the
movement showed that urban and physical spaces are still central in the imagination and
production of alternative models of society. The use of social media surely expanded the
scope and impact of the protests, but it was within the occupation encampments themselves
that real horizontal forms of participation were created. The dominant spaces of global
capitalism and representative politics were critiqued not just through protests but by embodied
participation and direct engagement with alternative systems. As an “ethical spectacle”, the
encampments were truly open and transparent, allowing a space for a diverse range of people
and ideologies to voice their grievances. While the movement surely transformed participants
to imagine different political systems, the long-term social infrastructure of relationships is still
questionable. Compared to temporary protests, the occupy movement was developed over
months of community building and intense experimentation. The next step would then be to
continue connecting networks of activists in order to find long-term strategies to move beyond
experimentation to building a permanent alternative space.

Conclusion

If it is our purpose to build cities for the enjoyment of vast numbers of people of wide
diverse background - and cities which will also be adaptable to future purposes - we

153
may even be wise to concentrate on the physical clarity of the image and to allow
meaning to develop without direct guidance.
- Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960, p. 8)

As the city continues to dominate social life, its potential redevelopment could be a
renaissance of local engagement with emergent behaviors of place. In both urban theory and
interaction design, there has been an increasing emphasis on engaging with the embodied
experience of space and all of its rich unconscious and conscious processes. Moving away
from modernist ideals and simplified models, the new urban form must be one that engages
with all the rich complexity of its social fabric and embraces bottom-up participatory initiatives.
Ethical spectacles and experimental occupations create massive, open-ended events that
suspend the dominated nature of urban space and open a place for playing out and learning
the possibilities of new social relations. Tactical interventions in space and media technology
allow new insights into future possibilities, while various groups reconfigure and appropriate its
hybrid and urban spaces in line with their beliefs and desires. Smart, pervasive environments
could further augment these social practices by reconfiguring appropriately to enhance one
social setting versus another. To reiterate Farman’s and Dourish’s point though, these systems
need to be legible and express themselves meaningfully to people in order to make their
processes apparent and their reprogramming possible. Additionally, with further developments
in augmented reality, one could easily imagine groups sharing a game space or overlaid grids
that are only visible to those opting in to the game or program. Like Everyday Urbanism, it is
important to analyze social practices in a non-judgmental and non-moralizing way to better
understand the drives, desires, and needs of a particular community of practices. The
emphasis on practices helps to reconceptualize communities based on social ritual and
cultural practices rather than on essentializing concepts of community. Because differing

154
communities act and communicate in a variety of forms, interfaces and systems should also be
differential and attend to a diversity of inputs and kinaesthetics. Everyday interventions and
tactical parklets are also a reminder how low-tech interventions can be testing grounds for
developing new forms of behaviors and framings of spaces. Cities are in constant flux and the
social makeup of places changes constantly. So again, the design of technical and physical
systems should be open enough to anticipate the possibility of long-term uses as well as future
uses. The vast and relative array of human behavior might seem daunting but it is a needed
remedy to maintain the liveliness of the city in face of ever encroaching attempts by capital (or
the state) to enclose possible activities and meaning. Another world is possible but it starts by
building upon the one that we’ve already come to love and hate.

155
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Chapter 3: Forming Communities:
Publics, Community Art, and Participatory Design

Introduction

Participation has become a central term in reconceptualizing artistic and design
practices in the late 20th to early 21st century. As both art and technological design enter into
everyday spaces and social spheres, the question of community and publics become central to
not only the reception of artwork but also the creative process itself. This chapter will look at
the development of theories and practices of “community art” and “participatory design”. I will
explore how the developments in community art and participatory design work towards a
holistic, scalable methodology for connecting communities with larger systems that organize
their lives. Then, I will conclude with an in-depth analysis of the The Leimert Phone Company
(LPC), a community-based design collaborative that I co-founded in 2012. The LPC works with
residents and local artists in an historically black neighborhood in South LA to redesign urban
technologies. In the face of urban development and potential gentrification, the projects are
designed to reinforce local cultural history, artistic creations, and social practices. This project
builds upon the traditions and theories of community art and participatory design, while
providing new insights and methodologies.
Moving away from models of single authorship or creative genius, community art and
participatory design incorporate collaboration from local citizens and “end users” - either
working with preformed organizations like labor unions or building upon more adhoc
community networks. The act of collaboration is both instrumental and politically radical. For
art, community-based practices reconnect the artist to the realm of the everyday and position
themselves as providers of social goods through empowerment, self-expression, and bridging

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cultural barriers. Participatory design (PD) seeks similar ends, but often with a goal of creating
design artifacts or prototypes to respond to local needs and issues. By designing with
communities who are often marginalized from product or technology design, PD uncovers new
issues and spaces for intervention. In both art and design, the rhetoric around participation is
tied to concepts of democracy and the role of everyday citizens to shape the world around
them.
In order to establish a conceptual framework for participation, publics, and democracy,
this chapter will first begin with theoretical discussions by influential political philosophers.
Mapping the models of Dewey and Habermas, I will set up a foundation for the role of
communication and dialogue within the formation of publics and community. Then these
notions become complicated by contemporary arguments by Nancy Fraser, Chantal Mouffe,
and Jean-Luc Nancy, who emphasize difference, deconstruction, and tension within the
formation of democratic participation in everyday life. Jean-Luc Nancy in particular has
become an influence of theories of community art, while Chantal Mouffe is central to
contemporary formulations of participatory design. These theoretical debates will set the
foundation for the chapter’s larger analysis of projects and case studies which illustrate the
ongoing issues in developing participatory methods within art and design.
Following the rise of 1960s conceptualism, performance art, and site-specific art, art
practices transitioned from a commodity-based autonomous sphere towards temporary,
playful, participatory, and political interventions aimed at the everyday. Whereas modernism
emphasized abstraction, visuality, formalism, and the privilege of the artist, these new socially-
oriented practices work through dialogue, process, spectacle, and engaged community
members. The artworks often benefit from creating ad-hoc, “semi-autonomous” spaces that
are in dialogue with the real world rather than the sterile, divorced autonomy of traditional art
galleries and museums. To borrow the famous phrasing from Michel de Certeau, these artists

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prefer “tactics” which are short lived and well-timed over “strategies” which are tied to the
power of institutions. The ephemeral nature of these performances and interventions are a
potent reaction to the legacy of the institution but they are also a potential downfall, particularly
when dealing with larger scale systemic issues.
Participatory design was developed in the 1970s, initially within Nordic countries as a
way of democratizing the workplace by incorporating workers into the design of their spaces
and systems. The methodology has since spread to other countries as well as other design
spaces, including everyday citizens and more marginalized communities - such as immigrant,
elderly, and youth populations (Karasti, 2014; Sabiescu, David, van Zyl, & Cantoni, 2014;
Björgvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren, 2012). In each instance, the co-design process is meant to
empower “users” by giving them critical insights and creative license to change the design of
systems that affect their daily lives. The concept of “infrastructuring” has become particularly
powerful in planning long-term projects and implementations, not just for the final designs but
also the social formation of future collaborations. In comparison to community art tactics,
participatory design represents a shift towards strategy and long-term systems for social
intervention.
In the conclusion, I will introduce the Leimert Phone Company, a community design
collaborative that I co-founded in South Los Angeles. Since we began the Leimert Phone
Company in 2012, our projects have sought to empower local community members to see
their built environment as malleable rather than static. We began with repurposing payphones
to do a range of functions: tell local stories, play local music, and spark explorations to local
institutions and business. From there, we have collaboratively created a historical urban game
(discussed in Chapter 2), a constellation of urban objects (bus benches, newspaper boxes,
etc), a pedestrian plaza, and speculative visions of AR-enabled autonomous vehicles. I will
discuss the speculative project, entitled Sankofa City, in more detail in the following Chapter 4.

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The final section in the chapter will also break down the ongoing issues that face
Leimert Park (and many other South Los Angeles communities) and their historical context. The
neighborhood was started as a planned “white only neighborhood” before housing covenants
were lifted and the area became a hub for African American music and arts in the late 1960s
(Exum & Guiza-Leimert, 2012; Chapple, 2010; Kurashige, 2010). Now with a subway line
opening in 2020, property values are increasing and there is a deep fear of gentrification and
cultural displacement. The Leimert Phone Company was birthed out of these issues and
concerns. Gentrification is a “wicked problem” affecting many urban areas in the US and
around the world. Our designs are stratagems for reinforcing local cultural activity and by
creating new relationships with outsiders to the neighborhood. Each new project builds upon
each other and creates infrastructures for future-facing projects and new community
formations.

The Third Dimension of Infrastructures of the Imagination

The glue that mends all of the pieces of this project together is participation and
forming social relationships, within and across communities. From the point of
conceptualization to the public exhibition and prototyping, infrastructures of the imagination
argues for maximal participation and a diversity of collaboration. In the most practical way, this
strengthens designs through wider input, novel ideas from “non-experts”, and insights from
end users. From an ethical and theoretical standpoint, diverse participation and non-
hierarchical decision making prefigures the types of social relationships that our speculative
projects are arguing for in the future.
Yet, forming communities and engaging with publics is not an easy task. While my own
collaborative and community-based work, which I discuss at the end of this chapter, has seen

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many evolving iterations, there were surely failures along the way. Participant attrition,
disengagement, and disagreement are unavoidable and need to be addressed throughout the
process. The concept of “agonistic democracy” has become increasingly central to
participatory design for this very reason. Democracy must address the desires and frustrations
of its participants, which are difficult to identify if they remain invisible and unexpressed.
Indeed, communication styles differ across groups and individuals. Working across
communities takes patience and dedication, often taking years to build trust and true
collaboration. Nevertheless, it is the most important and complicated dimension of
infrastructures of the imagination – to build a better world that accommodates a diversity of
dreams, desires, and publics.
This chapter will particularly examine projects within art and design, as my larger
dissertation project deals with physical forms and aesthetics tied to imagining futuristic
societies and better cities. Many of the projects address social issues – such as poverty,
discrimination, police brutality, and income equality – but are not always rooted in activism per
se. To truly address the powerful and deep community activist work locally or globally, is
beyond this dissertation. Rather, these projects seek imaginative, playful, and sometimes
functional aesthetic forms for making visible social identities or filling the gaps for collective
desires. As art and design often benefits the wealthiest in our societies, practitioners have
questioned their role in creating a better social good. As we move to the second half of this
dissertation, all of the interdisciplinary strands and past projects should come together in
defining the multiple dimensions of infrastructures of the imagination.

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I. From Aesthetic Objects to Democratic Processes

A. Aesthetics in Community Art and Social Design

The formal criterion for art has shifted significantly from visual aesthetics to ethics of
participation, as social issues and community dominate the context and content. Beginning
with avant-garde critiques in the 1920s, the art institution has been internally critiqued for its
market imperative and cultural autonomy from everyday social reality (Bishop, 2012; Kester,
2004; Kwon, 2004; Bürger, 1984). It was realized that the art institute was an instrument of
global finance and capital rather than a meaningful space of social critique and intervention.
The historic avant-garde meant to dramatically change this relationship. Dadaism and
Surrealism were violent formal and semiotic disruptions into the systems of language and
rationalization that were seen as central culprits to World War I that devastated modern
Europe, the supposed pinnacle of western civilization (Bürger, 1984).
Nevertheless, their projects were still tied to older forms of media and were often
discrete objects that could ultimately be re-appropriated by the dominant institutions of art.
Then, formalist experimentations and assumptions were carried to a dead-end by 1950s
abstract formalism, which continued to privilege the sublime vision of the artist (Kester, 2004).
In the 1960s, there was another paradigmatic shift away from commodifiable objects towards
temporary installations, performances, and interventions. Then through the vector of place-
based work in the 1970s and guided by critical development of US identity politics of the 1980-
1990s, community artwork became a dominant site for experimental art (Bishop 2012; Kwon,
2004). The net effect of focusing on ethics rather than aesthetics had led to internal
disagreements between theorists, like Grant Kester, Miwon Kwon, and Claire Bishop, as to
how to form legitimate criteria for measuring artistic value. The disagreements often split into

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issues of modes of address, visuality, and the very definition of community itself.
Bishop is the most critical of community art, claiming that ethics has replaced
aesthetics. She argues to reinsert the “disruptive” and defamiliarizing aesthetics of the avant-
garde, associated with Dadaism and Surrealism. Bishop (2012) critiques Kester’s refusal of
disruptive art because it takes the “idiosyncratic or controversial ideas are subdued and
normalize in favor of a consensual behavior” (p. 26). Her critique of consensus indirectly
echoes the theories of Chantal Mouffe (1994a, 1994b, 2000a, 2000b), who argues that
democracy is based on disagreement and agonism. Rather than disruption, Kester (2004)
argues for a “dialogical” aesthetic practice in which performance and communication are
central to establish new frames for understanding the world of others. He argues for a utopian
transformation through dialogue rather than shock (p. 153). The shift towards dialogue and
communitarianism is apparent as well in Miwon Kwon (2004), whose central critiques of social
artwork often depend on the modeling and enacting of community, particularly critiquing
notions of community that seem pre-formed, oversimplified, and essentializing. Both Kwon and
Kester look to the theories of Jean Luc-Nancy (1991) for unworking fictive mass identities and
imagined communities (Anderson, 2006). Because visual aesthetics are so easily co-opted by
commercialism, the emphasis of community art often grapples with social relations as form.
In parallel to the historic avant-garde Art movements, the Bauhaus in the 1920s argued
for a radically utopian design that inserted itself into everyday life (Greenhalgh, 1990). A
relatively young formalized field, design was always explicitly tied to industrial production and
commercialism. Designers began to see their role as productively constructing the models for
other possible worlds. Yet, like the art world, the notions of non-expert participation did not
fully manifest until much later. Participatory Design developed in the 1970s as a move to
democratize the design process and incorporate communities of end users into the design
process (Sundblad, 2010). Not only was it a radical leap away from the model of the expert, but

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it was also pragmatic to explore the desires and habits of those who were meant to use the
design objects. Participatory design originally started in Nordic countries to involve workers in
the design of their work space. From there, it evolved to incorporate a broad range of
communities and marginalized peoples, including immigrant populations, disabled and elderly,
and indigenous groups (Kapuire, Winschiers-Theophilus, & Blake, 2015; Karasti, 2014;
Sabiescu, David, van Zyl, & Cantoni, 2014; Björgvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren, 2012). No longer
would experts determine designs that were then implemented from the bottom up. Design
rather would become open and participatory, reflecting a diversity of needs and beliefs.
Since then, other social design methods have emerged such as “agonistic design”,
“design activism”, “convivial design”, and “conceptual design”. Similar to Claire Bishop’s
argument, Ilpo Koskinen (2016) points out that focusing on social relations often pushes
aesthetics to the background. He maps how agonistic design (associated with Carl DiSalvo)
and design activism (associated with Thomas Markussen) explicitly argue for notions of
“disruption” - in the tradition of the historic avant-garde. Their models parallel previous
arguments by Bishop to re-insert “disruption” into notions of community aesthetic and
audience address. In comparison, convivial design views aesthetics as something rooted in
and defined by the community, rather than the designer itself. Koskinen (2016) explains,
“[b]ecause the designers do not claim to have aesthetic authority over the community, they
create conditions for a community to emerge rather than orchestrate it in detail” (p. 24). Lastly,
“conceptual design” goes one step further to reject aesthetics all together for the sake of
working with communities to create temporary social events and gatherings. Such methods
parallel many of Kester’s and Kwon’s examples, as well as the temporary art gatherings termed
“relational aesthetics”, which will be discussed shortly in the deeper analysis of participation
and art. The distinction between “conceptual design” versus “relational aesthetics” though is
that the designer’s authorship of such events is often pushed to the background in comparison

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to relational art works such as those of Rirkrit Tiravanija.
In both art and design there is an ongoing struggle in the evaluation and criteria of work
and whether it derives merit from its aesthetic quality or its critical formation of new social
relations. Is the project shaped by the aesthetic sensibilities of the artist/designer or the
expression of the community? In most cases, it is a dialogue between the two; in some cases,
there is no aesthetic object at all. Ultimately, I agree with Bishop that aesthetics are important
for the public exhibition and potential impact. Aesthetics provide a richer sensory experience
that incites associations and affect - outside of overly rational and linguistic interpretations. But
I would argue against Bishop, DiSalvo, and Markussen in their attempts to re-insert any sense
of standardized modernist aesthetics. The goal of participatory art and design should always be
tied to the negotiation with community collaborators. By working directly with people, design
and art can be shaped to their needs and incorporate their worldviews. Community
collaborators may opt for aesthetics of perceptual disruption or they may argue for aesthetics
that provide wonder and a sense of the sublime. Ultimately, the aesthetics of a collaborative
piece are tied to the negotiations and democratic participation involved in the collaboration.
That is why theories of participation are so central to the development of both art and design
as they seek out and collaborate with everyday citizens and local communities.

B. Democracy, Participation, and Community

Modern notions of participation and community are intricately tied to democracy.
Participation is different than representation, and it is the role of citizens as agents in the act of
creation that I explore in this chapter. As Nico Carpentier (2016) discusses, representational
models - or minimalist democratic participatory models - focus on citizens selecting elite
powerful figures as representatives of their interest in the political sphere. Participatory and

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radical democracies - or maximalist democratic participatory models - rather are structured
around citizens’ direct participation in the process of political decision making. As discussed in
Chapter 2, Occupy was an attempt to model direct democracies without representatives.
As Carpentier argues, maximalist democratic participatory models think of politics and
participation as being embedded in everyday life and not just the institutions of government (as
in minimalist democratic participatory models). As I will discuss in section III, Participatory
Design (PD) developed out of the Scandinavian context of democratizing labor and the
workplace. The democratization of the workplace was emphasized by philosophers such as
Carole Pateman (1970), who claimed that for many citizens, the majority of their lives are spent
at the workplace which represent key institutions for empowering democratic participation.
She and other feminist philosophers, most notably Chantal Mouffe (1994a, 1994b), have
argued for shifting political participation away from the limited context of public governmental
institutions to everyday social spaces, such as the family, school, workplace, and community.
This shift in thinking would link the macro-participation of political institutions with micro-
participation, politicizing everyday life and individual identities.
This emphasis on the everyday social milieus plays particular importance in the types of
subjects and issues that are addressed within participatory arts and design. Within art and
design, a shift began in the 1960-70s towards directly incorporating local communities and
everyday citizens into the act of production. However, this ideal process becomes slippery and
complicated when put into practice. Questions of authorship and definitions of community are
not simple, but become an evolving negotiation to make sense of the role and relationship of
artists and designers to their collaborators.
Speaking in 1925, John Dewey set out to create a framework and history for the rise of
democracy and the role of communities and publics. At the time, he was responding to an
increasingly technologically-driven and centralized federal identity in the United States. Dewey

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(1954) argued that, “the Great Society created by steam and electricity may be a society, but it
is no community” (p. 98). Inspired by a Jeffersonian ideal of local autonomy, Dewey (1954)
claimed that historically, “American democratic polity was developed out of genuine
community life, that is, association in local and small centers where industry was mainly
agricultural… The forms of association were stable” (p. 111). While initial communities were
formed out of direct engagement and shared material concerns, the contemporary nation had
become disconnected and unstable.
Benedict Anderson called the process of 19th century national identity formation an
“imagined community”. Anderson (2006) explains, “it is imagined because the members of
even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even
hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (p. 6). He
particularly points to the role of newspapers and mass-media in creating a shared set of
stories, references, and concerns for the national consciousness. While limits to individual
exchanges across geographic boundaries prevent true community formation, mass media
produces the material for re-presenting the nation back to itself as a coherent whole.
Dewey similarly thought that communication was key to the formation of communities.
Through communication, communities are able to find shared meanings - full of desires and
dreams - as well as express their issues and concerns. He differentiated between communities
and publics, with the latter being a larger formation of indirect communities. Dewey (1954)
explains, “we are told that the public is the community as a whole, and a-community-as-a-
whole is supposed to be a self-evident and self-explanatory phenomenon” (p. 38). He goes on
to problematize this point that there are no self-evident publics nor universal community
formations, as each individual is socialized by their immediate surroundings and may have
contradicting identities and beliefs with other members of their community. Rather,
communities must negotiate in order to find a “community of interest”, finding shared ground

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in order to have a functioning relationship across pluralistic groups.
Communication is also central to the work of Jürgen Habermas (1974) in his evolving
concept of the “public sphere”. The public sphere is the space in which everyday citizens can
rationally debate political issues and develop a shared “public opinion.” Habermas (1996)
writes, “the success of deliberative politics depends not on a collectively acting citizenry but on
the institutionalization of the corresponding procedures and conditions of communication, as
well as on the interplay of institutionalized deliberative processes with informally developed
public opinions” (p. 298). He argues that institutional democracy should be indicative of and
based on the informal public meetings and discussion that lead to public opinion. In this
model, public opinion is based on more casual work of citizen groups that deliberate and
communicate to build consensus and agreement around shared issues. In his original
formation of the public sphere, Habermas cited salons and parlors in late 19th century France
as spaces in which citizens rationally debated and formed opinions outside of work and the
state. His example has since been critiqued because such spaces excluded women, people of
color, and the working poor (Fraser, 1990). However, his underlying ideals and theories of
participation and public opinion have continued. In his “consensus model”, rational
communication and deliberation are the central means to which democracy functions and
communities begin to form.
The differences between Dewey and Habermas are largely tied to the ways in which
they conceptualize community identity and communication. For Habermas, communication is
rational and excludes personal desires in the interest of finding issues that are common
amongst the larger community. As Antonio and Kellner (1992) argue, “Habermasian theory and
its dualistic rationalism underplays the role of emotion, expressiveness, and pleasure in social
interaction (e.g., Whiteboolt 1979). On the contrary, communication was, for Dewey, a
multidimensional process; bodily senses, emotion, empathy, fantasy, ecstasy, and other

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aesthetic sensibilities and feelings contribute to intelligence, symbolic interaction, and all
cooperative activities” (p. 284). Rather than erasing the complexity of affect and desire for pure
rationality, Dewey understood that true communication was a total, if not messy, process of
working through personal interests, emotions, and identities. Limiting the scope of appropriate
communication is indicative of larger problematics within Habermas’s definition of who
constitute a public.

C. Counterpublics, Inoperative Communities, and Agonism

The prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions, nor to relegate them
to the private sphere in order to render rational consensus possible, but to mobilize
these passions, and give them a democratic outlet.
- Chantal Mouffe (1994b: 109)

As previously stated, Habermas has been critiqued for over simplifying and excluding
difference in his conception of the public sphere and deliberation. As Antonio and Kellner
(1992, p. 282) argue, Habermas defined public identity as a “universally taken-for granted”
identity rather than tied to the intersectional identity of gender, race, class, etc. In his
conception, the public was a monolithic entity of non-governmental citizens who, if allowed to
freely gather, would create a unified vision of their concerns. Dewey recognized there were
many publics rather than a singular, total sphere. Dewey (1954) claimed, “there are too many
publics and too much of public concern for our existing resources to cope with” (p. 126). The
problem for Dewey rather was there were insufficient structures of participation to fully capture
the diverse groups of citizens and their related concerns. While Dewey used the term “publics”
to signify the diversity of interests, theorists such as Michael Warner (2002) and Nancy Fraser

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(1990) used the term “counterpublics” to identify public spheres that represent radical,
marginalized, or antagonistic communities against the power of dominant public spheres.
In her oft-cited rebuttal of Habermas, Nancy Fraser (1990) claims, “not only were there
always a plurality of competing publics but the relations between bourgeois publics and other
publics were always conflictual” (p. 62). She argues that the Habermasian definition of the
public sphere was merely the dominant one of property-owning white males, while there were
many tangential and less sanctioned publics around intersectional issues. She goes on to
argue that the “bourgeois” public sphere actively blocked the wider participation and interests
of other groups from the conversation. One of the ways in which other interests are blocked is
through defining what is considered a “public” issue versus “private” interests. For example,
Fraser (1990) states that domestic abuse was considered a private issue of the home which
was excluded from public discourse. Only through women advocacy groups - or
counterpublics - was the issues taken as a systematic problem deserving of public attention.
Similar to the arguments of Pateman and Mouffe, Fraser argues for politicizing the social
sphere to widen what is deemed appropriate for political discussion and democratic
participation. Therefore we see that Habermas’s “public sphere” has been critiqued for the
policing of public identities, communications strategies, and the boundaries of what is
appropriate for “public” debate. His “consensus model” of democracy is found lacking. In an
attempt to achieve universally agreed upon issues and concerns, more diverse interests are
erased in the process.
Political philosophers such as Chantal Mouffe and Jean-Luc Nancy argue that
communities form across pluralistic boundaries not through agreement, but disagreement.
Mouffe argued for an “agonistic model” of democracy while Nancy offers an idea of the
“inoperative community”. Mouffe’s concepts have been particularly influential on participatory
design while Luc-Nancy has been adapted within community art practice and theory. Both

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point to more radical deconstructive concepts that embrace and build upon differences rather
than shared similarities.
For Mouffe, the “agonistic model” is distinct from the “consensus model”, which she
argues is tied to philosophers Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. While consensus models
seek shared interests across social communities, there is the possibility of agreeing on the
least common denominator. The shared concern may not address - or even erase - more
pressing issues that threaten particular vulnerable communities. In an interview with Dave
Castle (1998), Mouffe explains, “while we desire an end to conflict, if we want people to be free
we must always allow for the possibility that conflict may appear and to provide an arena
where differences can be confronted.” Rather than negate desires and individual issues for the
common goals of the nation, Mouffe argues that those issues and desires should be
forefronted. Intergroup “agonism” is thus necessary in order to address and discuss the
underlying differences and tensions within a pluralistic society. She uses the term agonism (or
adversary) to differentiate from antagonism (or enemy). Indeed, “agonism” is the result of
transforming persistent social antagonism into a meaningful and working relationship.
Like Mouffe, Jean Luc-Nancy positions the “inoperative community” as a productive
“unworking” of community, as a way of addressing identity both outside of the workplace and
outside of imagined national community identities. The process of deconstructive unworking
forces individuals to critique and reexamine notions of community identity and formation. He is
critical of arguments that claim that there was ever a loss in past ideal community life, such as
Dewey’s idealization of early America. Luc-Nancy (1991) claims that, “at every moment in
history, the Occident has rendered itself to the nostalgia for a more archaic community that has
disappeared” (p. 10). He argues that such statements are merely illusory claims that breed
myths, which may appear innocent in intention but are potentially dangerous foundations of
nationalism and ethnocentrism. Nancy (1991) is also critical of Marxist and labor-based notions

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of community that are driven by workplace relationships. He argues that unworking is
necessary to create real human relationships outside of productive labor. Much like Lefebvre
(discussed in Chapter 2) argued that pedagogies of space happen through leisure and non-
productive activities, Nancy argues that real community relationships can only happen once
they have been untethered from the structures of the workplace.
So while Dewey argued that true community was lost in the formation of the modern
capitalist nation-state, Jean Luc-Nancy claims that such arguments are nostalgic myths.
Indeed, the United States has always been a fraught community of differing and competing
identities and beliefs. While Anderson showed how mass media created the communication
infrastructure for an “imagined community”, the development of networked and participatory
media has fractured that simplified sense of unity. Now, the internet and social media spaces
have emerged to reveal that the imagined community is very fractured (Persily, 2017;
Carmines, Ensley, & Wagner, 2016; Barocas, 2012; Metaxas & Mustafaraj, 2012) and the
macro community (or public) of the nation state cannot fully capture the deep seated divisions
that persist across geographic, religious, and racial differences. Current technology then has
revealed and perpetuated the true polyvocal nature of our public community.
The philosophical argument to shift from a monolithic national sense of community
parallels earlier discussed arguments to shift participation purely from public institutions to
everyday life. The democratic infrastructures that feed into a national representative system are
insufficient to address the complicated identities and power relationships that persist in our
society. So then how do communities form and how do they participate in order to share their
desires and concerns? Working through the process of forming community has become a
complicated task. Art and design have evolved to incorporate community participation as they
move away from eroding modernist notions of single authorships. Especially as art and
technology move deeper into the realm of the workplace and everyday society, they must be

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critiqued to increase self-awareness of the relationships and values that are formed or
represented. Participation offers a possibility to not only represent but incorporate citizens and
community members in the creative process.

II. Art and Participation History

A. 1920-1950s: Modernist Aesthetics and Assumptions

The historic avant-garde of Art developed in the wake of World War I and was opposed
to rationalism/positivist sciences, which they blamed partially responsible for the systematic
butchery of the war. Avant-garde art rather created a visceral attack on the viewer to force
them out of their “habitual forms of perception” and open up new possibilities for a utopia
outside of bourgeois capitalism. As Grant Kester (2004) claims, these radical forms of art were
still based on a Kantian notion of the sublime and an assumption that art can speak to us
universally because we all share a common sense (Gemeinsinn) or a “common cognitive
experience of the world” (p. 28). Kester (2004) continues, “aesthetic experience prepares us, so
to speak, for entry into an idealized community of speakers” (p. 29). Aesthetics then is a higher
order of communication that helps develop our limited, albeit shared, conscious framework of
the world. As aesthetics increasingly became co-opted by political propaganda and
advertising, art needed a new, abstract formulation of the aesthetic sublime.
Clement Greenberg and his championed modernist painters were adamant about the
impenetrability of abstraction that lead to infinite possible interpretations or emphasized
medium-specific materiality over indexical representation. The emphasis on infinite
interpretations is held up against the closed systems of meaning in popular culture, such as

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those theorized by Horkheimer and Adorno in their seminal essay, “The Culture Industry”. As
Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) claim, “No independent thinking must be expected from the
audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure (which collapses
under reflection), but by signals” (p. 22). The power of mass cultural products then is this
potential to apply abstract systems of domination over the total sensorium of the seemingly
powerless audience.
Their critique is no doubt a byproduct of witnessing the rise of fascism and a
conceptualization of the masses as being helpless to the programming of dominant culture.
But in critiquing the aesthetics of the dominant culture industry, modernist artists were
perpetuating the same paradigm of top-down cultural production. As Kester (2004) argues, this
conception essentially gave the artist a privileged, epistemological position as the “true seer”,
based on an immaculate perception of the world, that had to be communicated to the
audience, irrespective of their identity (p. 48).

The radical power of art then still resided in the
privileged position of the artist and the aesthetic form divorced from the particulars of the
social world or the audience. Moreover, the formalist tendencies of open interpretation proved
to be easily co-opted as works of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock were quickly subsumed
by the capitalist art market. It would have to take a more radical shift towards temporality, the
particulars of place, and audience participation to get over the Enlightenment hangover of
these modernist assumptions.

B. 1960s: Participation and Anti-Aesthetics

In Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop (2012) points to France in the 1960s to uncover three
distinct trends in developing a “neo-avant garde” that championed participation: The
Situationist International (SI), Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), and the provocative

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performances of Jean-Jacques Lebel. The importance of each of these groups is not only their
critiques of the art world but that each group claimed partial responsibility for the historical and
massive France-wide student and worker protests of May 1968 (Lebel actually stopped his
performances after May 1968, claiming that his work had been done). All three groups looked
to participation, in the words of Guy Debord, as a way to “rehumanise a society rendered
numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist production” (quoted in
Bishop, 2012, p. 79).

What is instructive about the three groups is their differing processes for
achieving such goals - and how they speak to contemporary forms of participatory art.
GRAV focused on designing interactive and playful technological installations that
provided sensorially rich experiences while allowing people to break from the monotony of the
modern city. In many ways, their work encompassed more playful forms of what would later
become tactical urbanism (discussed in Chapter 2). GRAV’s work was never overtly political or
alienating as they tended to think participation and momentary bliss as an end in itself. In
comparison, Jean-Jacques Lebel created performances (his own form of Kaprow’s
“happenings”) that were aggressively political, highly sexual, and often purposefully
antagonistic to the audience. Bishop (2012) claims, that unlike Kaprow’s happenings which
were pre-designed and pre-scored, the musical arrangements and process of Lebel were often
improvised in dialogue with the audience.
The work of SI is particularly interesting because of its long-standing influences on
contemporary urban art practices and theories. Yet in reality, SI made very little “art” outside of
the theoretical manifestos. The first few SI shows were conceptual attacks on authorships,
showcasing uncredited paintings that were merely created by painting over purchased flea
market art. Then after discussions with Lefebvre, the SI’s intellectual leader Guy Debord
became increasingly anti-art and said everything should be revolutionary in its form as well as
content (Bishop, 2012). Debord argued that images had become the tool of the “society of

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spectacle” (Debord, 1970) and were suspect to being coopted for consumerism. So there was
little documentation of work and art became secondary for agitprop while theory became
primary tool. Even the psychogeographic graph of Paris is more a trigger or tool than an
actually record. They claimed to sacrifice art in order to make the everyday more into the
richness of art.

So rather than create discrete objects, they were inventing ludic processes that
were particularly interested in educating the workers, making them aware of the systems of
dominance. Their playfulness was of the utmost seriousness though. Guy Debord’s “Theory of
Dérive” (2002) makes very explicit that the dérive is not driven by chance and unconscious
whimsy (a not-so-veiled critique of Surrealism) but is a form of collecting data by learning how
the built environment governs bodily movement and communicates.

What we see then in the SI
is the most dogmatic anti-aesthetic combined with, more importantly, an emphasis on a
systematic dialogue with the particularities of place.

C. 1980s-1990s: Place, Community, and Identity

Social utopias and revolutionary hopes [have] given way to day-to-day micro-utopias
and mimetic strategies.
-Nicholas Bourriaurd, quoted in Media and Participation (Carpentier, 2016, p. 61)

In Miwon Kwon’s One Place After Another (2004), she identifies Richard Serra’s Tilted
Arc (1981) as a pivotal point in the development of site-specific art and its relationship to
community. Serra’s work was seen in the larger context of the time of placing art into urban
environments to communicate with architectural spaces and help liven up the often
dehumanizing effect of modern urban planning. Despite the echoing of intentions of the
participatory artists of the 1960s, this agenda was much more couched in aesthetic

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appeasement and instrumentality in bettering the experience of downtown corporate office
complexes. Serra’s intentions were anything but appeasement and the subsequent backlash to
his work lead to what Kwon (2004) calls, “one of the most high-profile battlegrounds for the
broad-based ‘culture wars’ of the late 1980s” (p. 80). Serra’s work was commissioned by U.S.
General Services Administration in 1979, built in 1981, and then dismantled in 1989. The
project consisted of a tall sculpture, with a massive iron structure that cut through the central
plaza area of multiple skyscrapers. The intention behind the piece was to physicalize the social
and class divisions of urban space, particularly between those on the ground and those inside
the mega-structures and skyscrapers of power. Rather than reinforce an unproblematic, unified
viewed of public space, the sculpture meant to explicitly expose the complex hierarchies of the
city. This antagonism was re-framed by critics though as another attempt of a federally funded
art world imposing itself on the greater public good of the everyday citizen. As Kwon (2004)
stated, the fallout from the work was so detrimental that the National Endowment of the Arts
further institutionalized its developing mandate that artists develop, “methods to insure an
informed community response to the project” (p. 81). Thus, art had to contend with questions
of community and identity as it moved from the gallery and into the public realm.

Figure 18: John Ahearn’s The South Bronx Bronzes (1988). Community workshops with local youth to
create sculptures (left) and the final sculpture (right). Copyright Christof Kohlhofer.

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In contrast to Serra’s shocking interrogation of place, John Ahearn was federally funded
in 1991 to construct a public sculpture in the South Bronx that was for, by, and of the people
(Figure 18). Ahearn, a white male artist, had been living in the largely Latino and African-
American neighborhood. The intended site was an underused concrete triangle at an
intersection just across from the 44th District Police Department. Ahearn had already built up a
practice of creating realistic, plaster sculptures of everyday life in the neighborhood. Moreover,
during the 1991 project, he created all of his sculptures on the street and often with local
youth. Whenever anyone participated, he created two copies to give them one as a reward for
their labor. As Kwon (2004) claims, Ahearn, “devised a very specific economy of intimate
exchange and local distribution for his art” (p. 88). He was the perfect remedy for the post-
Serra critique of artist and community. Yet despite this intimate relationship, his final sculptures
were also forced to be taken down. Ahearn was attempting to capture the raw, survivalist
“attitude of the Bronx” and looking to the youth to help point out local heroes in the
community. But the heroes that he chose to depict, specifically one man in a dark hoodie with
his chained pit bull dog, were read by the more established residents of the neighborhood as
reinforcing negative stereotypes.
The older members of the community did not recognize themselves in the sculptures at
all, but rather saw these depictions as the very image that they were fighting against. Ahearn
quickly removed the piece in consensus with the loudest voices of the community backlash.
His public unveiling revealed a fraught intergenerational agonism within the South Bronx
community. Despite the best efforts by an artist to build consensus in his process, he
ultimately recapitulated a pre-existing and possibly “stereotypical” image of the neighborhood.
The fallout of the project proved how particular and complex the process of community identity
could become. As I will discuss in later sections on my own community design work, there are
multiple axis of identity that go into defining a location. Often intergenerational differences are

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discounted in the face of homogenizing claims of racial or ethnic identity of a neighborhood. As
we learned throughout our own work, different generations have competing claims as to what
best represents themselves and their space. Again, this raises the need for agonistic
representations that showcase a diversity of voices rather than a monolithic consensus of
identity.

III. Complicating Participatory Art Forms

A. Debates around Institutionalizing Community Art

In 1992, artists and curators Suzanne Lacy and Mary Jane Jacobs staged “Culture in
Action” in Chicago. It was one of the largest community-based art shows in history, and was
meant to highlight Suzanne Lacy’s concept of the “new public art-genre” which sought to
privilege the community as the ultimate authority of place-based art work. She claimed that
this new genre, “encourages community coalition-building in pursuit of social justice” (as cited
in Kwon, 2004, p. 105). This exhibition highlighted a range of physical forms and social topics:
a Latino-history themed parade, youth-based video workshops to get young gang members to
communicate, a series of chocolate bars packaged to highlight union victories, and more.
Rather than focus on a criteria on formal elements, the emphasis shifted towards the ethics of
working in collaboration towards what Mary Jane Jacobs called “issue-specific” and
“audience-specific” artworks. Despite all the positive intentions, the show still had some
marginal backlash against what was seen as exploitative practices of artists using community
to make their work.

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In particular, Kwon is critical of Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio’s We Got It!
The Workforce Makes the Candy of their Dreams and Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler’s Eminent
Domain projects. Ericson and Ziegler’s project in particular was problematic because the
actual form of the artwork was already preconceived before a community was ever identified.
Kwon claims the issue with Grennan’s and Sperandio’s project is that they worked with a
union. Since a union is already a “politically coherent community” (a term coined by Grant
Kester [2004]), they are the easiest to co-opt because their individuality is compromised for the
sake of the larger entity (p. 161). Her critique of this community artwork is founded on Jean-
Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community (1991). As discussed previously, Nancy is critical of
notions of community tied to productive labor and workplaces.
Nancy’s larger critique of community is that it is often based on an attempt to reconcile
and uncover the essence between people, thus searching for a universalizing basis of identity.
But as so many post-Enlightenment and Postmodernist thinkers have since claimed, identity is
never fixed or stable, let alone universal. Nancy (1991) claims, “the thought of community or
the desire for it might well be nothing other than a belated invention that tried to respond to the
harsh reality of modern experience” (p. 4). He claims that only in the ‘unworking’ of community
can individuals recognize their differences and begin to understand each other. This radical call
for an inoperative community was developed right as the term “community” is being co-opted,
as Kwon (2004) argues, by “the business community, the entertainment community, the
medical community, the scientific community, [etc]” (p. 112). Echoing Nancy, Kwon rejects any
notion of stable community. She concludes her book by developing a concept of art praxis that
seeks to explore the multiple forms of identity and interest that are not bound to place. Kwon
(2004) wants to redefine “site as predominantly an intertextually coordinated” place full of
physical and conceptual forms of nomadism, as by-products of a globalized world (p. 159).
Kwon argues for defining a site based on references to global relationships and inspirations -

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alongside local struggles for identity. Kwon in turn then seeks to create definitions of
community that are hybridized and negotiated.
Kester (2004) claims though that Kwon creates a simplistic binary between coherent
and inoperative communities. He states that in fact, particularly as a consequence of
globalization, communities are often self-consciously conceptualized as contingent. He points
to Cristen Crujido’s 1999 project El Proyecto Milagro, which documented the experience of
Mexican migrant workers on the Sycamore Farms in Wadell, Arizona. The farmers there called
themselves “la familia” to show the strong, intimate, sense of their relationships (Kester, 2004,
pp. 163-165). Nevertheless, the workers that Crujido interview are very explicit and self-
conscious of the fact that their ‘familia’ is a temporary and contingent one. They are only ‘la
familia’ in work but then they are separated when they go back to their real families in Mexico
during the off-season.
What Kester’s example, and his larger overall argument, point to is the way in which
identity formation around community are often complex processes. For Kester, some of the
most successful works are those that do not merely attempt to represent a community but
rather put opposing communities into dialogue. Two particularly salient examples he refers to
are Suzanne Lacy’s Roof on Fire (1994) and Code 33 (1999) in Oakland, California. The main
crux of both projects was to create a safe, semi-autonomous space for Oakland Police and
youth of color to have an open, meaningful dialogue. As Kester (2004) argues, “the larger goal
of the Code 33 project was to challenge the tendency of the police to view all young people of
color as potential threats and the tendency of young people in the city to view all police as
racist and/or excessively authoritarian” (p. 183). The artwork created a space for opposing
“communities” to suspend their normalized antagonism. By acting as an intermediate or semi-
autonomous place, the art piece was separated from both the social pressures of the
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While the first Roof on Fire was considered a startling success, her second iteration of
the project (Code 33) experienced a more complicated performance. Across the street from
Code 33 was a protest against the wrongful l death-row sentencing of Mumia Abu Jamal. As
the performance continued, the protestors increasingly tried to intervene and gain access to
the rooftop, the safe space of the art show. A number of the police officers began to remobilize
around policing the space by denying entrance to and arresting encroaching protesters. But it
was a difficult, haphazard operation to identify who were “legitimate” audience members and
who were protestors. As Kester (2004) claims, “Codes 33 suggests just how difficult it can be
to fully bracket “extradialogical” power differences and to at least partially suspend our
identifications within dialogical encounters” (p. 187). The work proved that semi-autonomous
art spaces were never fully divorced from the habituated real world spaces of antagonistic
communities. Nevertheless, the foundation of the work (as well as similar works by groups
such as WochenKlauser) prove the power of inter-community dialogue to remove officially
sanctioned identities and have open conversations that are based on how to negotiate
difference. The issue is rather that the construction of semi-autonomous spaces - that
supposedly enable more sympathetic communication - are actually contingent and tenuous.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, the global artist (Argentina-born of Thai descent living in New York
and Berlin) has become renown for creating what he calls “parallel spaces.” He conceptualizes
them as utopic non-capitalist places for real and open exchanges of food, drink, and
conversation. Yet his utopic spaces are often constructed merely in the context of the art
gallery in various cities where he is commissioned to work. One problematic example that
Kester (2004) points to is his “Tomorrow is Another Day” project in Cologne in 1996-97.
Though his projects claim to transgress public and private space, his gallery show had a guard
policing the entrance. One of the reasons for the guard was because a nearby homeless
encampment was being displaced for redevelopment of that neighborhood. In a dark irony, his

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“parallel space” did not melt the borders of the art institution but rather reinforced their
separation from the social context of place. This larger symptomatic function of globe-trotting
dialogical artists prove the danger of the art market to co-opt the vanguards of the time while
divorcing their radical imperatives and ethical processes. The sum-effect is what Miwon Kwon
(2004) calls an “aesthetic of administration”, where the artist mirrors the affective labor now
characterized by a post industrial economy (p. 4). The art becomes the artists’ institutionally
sanctioned presence rather than real work around social issues or community engagement.
An artist’s lack of time commitment to place and community is the biggest factor, I
would argue, in the dark side of the popularization of community art. Returning to Culture in
Action (1992), one of the most successful and long-standing projects to come from that
exhibition was the Street Level Video project. It developed as a semi-educational video
collective in the West Town neighborhood in Chicago. It was intended to encourage youth
gang members to speak to each other and collaboratively create a broader understanding of
their community and their relationship to it. Their videos were shown in public spaces to create
a festive, peaceful gathering. As a result of the success of the project, it has continued as
Street Level Youth Media, as Kester (2004) points out (p. 118). The project’s success is largely
about creating an infrastructuring, as coined by Participatory Designers (Karasti, 2014; Dantec
& DiSalvo, 2013; Björgvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren, 2012; Karasti & Syrjänen, 2004), for youth to
not only learn media but also learn how to reframe their identity in relation to larger notions of
community. While the temporary, semi-autonomous spaces are effective in suspending
identities, the strategic framework of the collective allows those inoperative identities to spill
out and coalesce into permanent change.

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B. Place and Pedagogy: Molecular explorations rather than Cultural representation

Socially based artwork takes time to truly understand the cultural complexities of a
community. Another strategy for temporary interventions is to focus more on empowerment
through education, particularly around ecological and scientific knowledge that evades
everyday understandings. Critical Art Ensemble (2012), which helped coined the term “tactical
media”, has been very active in socially engaged art related to science. CAE became best
known publicly after the 2004 arrest and subsequent four-year investigation and trial of
founding member Steve Kurtz and his scientific collaborator, Dr. Robert Ferrell. The arrest was
made after police found bio-culture equipment in their basement following the untimely (but
natural) death of Steve’s wife, Hope Kurtz. In the days of post-9/11 and post-2001 anthrax
attacks, the findings were immediately picked out by Assistant US Attorney William J. Hochul
to become part of federal grand jury trial for potential bioterrorism (Holmes, 2012). Ultimately,
Kurtz and Ferrell won the trial, but the process pointed to the very political importance of their
work.
The project that CAE was working on was Free Range Grain, an interactive installation
and public science lab that was set to be at the MOMA. The project was conceptualized
around exploring the burgeoning genetically modified organism (GMO) industry and the
realization that scientific knowledge was extremely alienating to all but trained specialists. With
the help of scientists, they found a safe way to spray chemicals to only inhibit the expression of
the modified genes. The project was a DIY attempt to intervene in the invisible workings of the
industrial-scientific world. This represented a larger imperative in their work, as Brian Holmes
claims in the introduction of their book Critical Art Ensemble: Disturbances. Holmes (2012)
claims, “the fascinating thing about CAE’s performances is that they are no longer
representations but proving grounds” (p. 14). Not only did they create an actual working

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chemical substance, but they also turned the art gallery into public science lab. Understanding
the difficulties of scientific knowledge, the public lab was an open way to physically engage
with non-experts and help them think critically about how to understand the politics of science.
Effectively, the artist works as translator to build knowledge around (often purposefully)
obscured systems.
In 2008, CAE did another scientifically-engaged project Peep Under the Elbe in a
marginalized neighborhood called Wilhelmsburg, in Hamburg, Germany. The artist took up
temporary residence in public housing as part of the initiative to immerse themselves in the
neighborhood. They focused on scientific education rather than on cultural-representation,
especially considering their short time and little cultural understanding of the area. Their
intervention was to work with local citizens and fishermen to train them how to test chemicals
in the local water. One of their most dramatic finds was discovering large amounts of arsenic in
the popular swimming area (Critical Art Ensemble, 2012, p. 176). Rather than attempt an
ethnographic project or community based project around identity, CAE focused on
pedagogical interventions to arm citizens with the ability to scientifically critique (and thus
speak) about their environment.
As climate change will continue to intensify in the future, community art and
participatory projects will need to better engage with science and citizen education.
Admittedly, in our own speculative work (discussed in Chapter 4) we did not delve enough into
the actual science of creating sustainable gardening and ecosystems. The work of CAE offers
examples for how art and design can creatively engage with science education as well.
Citizens can then more practically engage with the (often difficult) scientific knowledge needed
to truly comprehend climate change, environmental degradation, and pollution. Particularly
during a presidential administration that politicizes the climate and scientific knowledge,
scientific education and intervention will become increasingly needed to combat disinformation

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and public ignorance. The environment is a key underlying system to both our sense of space
and well-being. As we continue to create participatory systems for everyday citizens, ecology
should be just as important as technology.

IV. Participatory Design History

In the interest of emancipation, we deliberately made the choice of siding with workers
and their organizations, supporting the development of their resources for a change
towards democracy at work.
- Pelle Ehn, Scandinavian Design (1993, p. 47)

As Kwon (2004) discussed in her critiques of Culture in Action, one of the issues of
individual artists working with a community is that they often rely heavily on intermediaries to
help organize and communicate (p. 121-123). The issue is the inherent temporal and relational
limit of the artist to the community. Collaborations demand time investments to really get to
know a community and “Participatory Design” is a more systematic way to deal with questions
of community engagement. The field is less oriented towards the grander notions of
consciousness shifting of community art, but its approach is more pragmatic. The approach
equally takes serious the complexities of community and the need to design with and for a
particular group of people, with particular issues and desires. Moreover, this process also
involves elements of pedagogy and “infrastructuring”. As Christopher Le Dantec and Carl
DiSalvo (2013) explain, “infrastructuring, then, is the work of creating socio-technical resources
that intentionally enable adoption and appropriation beyond the initial scope of the design, a
process that might include participants not present during the initial design” (p 241). Thus,

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rather than creating temporal performances, this process is focused on creating long-term and
modular systems for continuous interaction and improvement. In this section, I will outline the
historical development and current issues of participatory design, focusing especially on
models of democratic participation and issues of community collaboration.

A. 1970-1980s: Participatory Design foundations: In the Workplace

In 1972, Kristen Nygaard led a team of design researchers to work with the Norwegian
Iron and Metal Workers Union (NJMF). The goal was to “emancipate” workers by incorporating
their beliefs and desires into the design of their workplace (Sundblad, 2010, p. 177). Following
shifts in theories of democracy (Pateman, 1970), their project focused on increasing
participation in the workplace - outside of sanctioned institutional forms of representational
participation. Additionally, the project was a response to the increasing presence of computer
systems and technologies that were becoming intertwined into the work environments. Fears
of automation undermining union and worker rights lead to increased desires for strengthening
worker participation and design configurations. Nygaard’s work lay the foundation of
“cooperative design”, or what would later be called “participatory design”.
Then in 1981, Pelle Ehn and Morten Kyng developed the UTOPIA project to work with
the Nordic Graphic Union (NGU) in order to create designs for new computer-driven work
environments for graphic artist and laborers. As Sundblad (2010) explains, “the overall research
objective of UTOPIA was to contribute to the development of methods for involving end users
in all phases of design and development of IT support for their activities” (p. 179). The project
lasted five years and worked tirelessly in a process of mutual learning for researchers to
understand the needs, desires, and goals of the workers. Thanks to their union, six graphics
workers were funded to work part-time in order to dedicate themselves to the co-design

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process. Through their collaboration, the teams created a new workstation and interface that
was designed and adopted by the graphics workers. Rather than design a product for a set of
end users, the product was developed with them. The approach gave users a voice and
provided valuable insights to the designers in creating better systems.
In both instances, the end users represented a “community of practices” in which
participants formed around their shared activities (Sundblad, 2010, p. 184). Paul Dourish (2004)
describes “communities of practices” as ones that, “share histories, identity, and meaning
through their common orientation toward and participation in practical activities” (p. 186).

This
community is not tied to identity and beliefs as much as the practices tied to labor and
everyday activities. As discussed in previous sections regarding unions, Jean-Luc Nancy
(1991) would critique such community formations as ones that are tied to productive labor and
ultimately override the individual autonomy and beliefs. As Participatory Design evolved to
move outside of the workplace, the notions of community would become more complicated
and less pre-determined.
Following an emphasis on the workplace, participatory design shifted to focus on
design technologies within the everyday, working with the concerns of everyday citizens,
marginalized and indigenous communities (Winschiers-Theophilus & Bidwell, 2013; Cochran et
al., 2008), children (Ruland, Starren, & Vatne, 2008; Moraveji, Li, Ding, O’Kelley, & Woolf, 2007),
and the elderly (Vanden Abeele & Van Rompaey, 2006; Ellis & Kurniawan, 2000). As Kanstrup,
Sejer Iverson, and Petersen (2004) explain, “emancipation is no longer a matter of freeing the
oppressed worker…[but] rather emancipation from alienating technology and from being
trapped in front of a screen in most of your domestic activities. Quality in work is now replaced
by a concern with quality in life” (p. 8). As technology infiltrates all sections of social life, it has
the potential to empower but also entrap citizens. Fourteen years after Iverson et al.’s paper,
recent studies have shown that adolescents and young adults are increasingly spending time

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with their devices rather than going out. While this has reduced rates of STDs and drunk
driving, it has also increased rates of depression and suicide (Twenge, 2017; Weller, 2017) .
Networked technology has become so deeply intermeshed into the fabric of our everyday lives
that it is restructuring the social activities and affective dimensions of our existence.

B. 2000s: Participatory Design today: Everyone is an “end user”

These are political acts and always take place in a background of potentially challenged
hegemony. In this view, public spaces are always plural and where different projects
confront … that help transform antagonism into agonism, from conflict between enemies
to constructive controversies among “adversaries” who have opposing matters of
concern but also accept other views as “legitimate”.
- Björgvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren, “Participatory design
and Democratizing Innovation” (2010, p. 48)

Participatory Design then is a strategy for reimagining or designing new systems for
communities. Rather than just appropriating pre-existing technologies, as discussed in the
previous chapter’s section on Tactical Media, Participatory Design also seeks to create wholly
new design forms. This process takes time and a deep commitment to the heterogeneous
nature of multiple publics and communities - outside of preconceived organizational identities.
To represent this shift, some Participatory Designers have shifted their process from design
projects to design Things - a social-material assemblage. As Björgvinsson et al. (2010) explain,
“a major challenge has to do with what is being designed - a “thing” (object or service) or a
“Thing” (socio-material assembly that deals with “matters of concern”) that is characterized by
a movement towards participatory design in open public spaces rather than within an

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organization” (p. 41). A Thing represents the complex and open nature of the process, in which
participants are building social relationships and norms as well as the actual design artefacts
themselves. As I discussed in great detail in Chapter 1, the work of design fiction and
speculative design also use creative methods in order to explore the social dimensions of
future technologies.
Drawing from Dewey, Björgvinsson et al. (2010) refer to “matters of concern” as
underlying issues for organizing and forming working social groups. Rather than a “community
of practice”, these groups form around pressing issues or desires that warrant new design
solutions. The process is a prefigurative one in which the possibility of a future solution inspired
participants to group and collaborate. The solutions themselves are not predetermined and
must be created through a “dialogical” process of designers and participants. As Judith
Gregory (2003) points out, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire was influential in the early
foundations of Scandinavian approaches to participatory design. Freire’s emphasis on critical
consciousness and dialogic teaching was similarly aimed at disrupting hierarchies in order to
expand democratic participation and involve participant (or student) insight.
In Freire’s groundbreaking book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), he proposes a
“dialogical” process of education against, what he calls, the prevailing “banking-system” of
education. He claims that education is fundamentally narrative and assumes that the world is a
static object, mere content of a pre-plotted grand story. The “banking-system” of education
then is based on this idea of depositing the objective truths - or contents of the grand narration
- into their subjects (Freire, 1970, p. 83-84). It sees people as spectators of the world as it
passes by, rather than emphasizing that reality is a work in progress and that they have the
potential to act and change that world. In comparison to the “banking-system”, dialogical
education focuses on “problem-posing” education that emphasizes critical awareness and the
emergence of a new consciousness (vs submergence into a predefined one) that works

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through action and reflection.
Reflection is the first step. It deconstructs the “background awareness” of individuals
by asking them to systematically identify and break down their common sense notions of the
world. It begins by acknowledging difference and the ways in which difference is constructed
under the imperatives of the ruling class. Freire (1970) goes so far to say that, “problem-posing
education is revolutionary futurity” (p. 84). Problem-based education then leads subjects to
intentionally identify and deconstruct issues of the world, emphasizing that they can radically
change the present and the future. By deconstructing a falsely naturalized social order,
students can begin to imagine alternatives that benefit them rather than the economic elite.
Part of the education process also involved deconstructing everyday objects to reflect on how
they fit into the larger matrix of work, community, identity, and power.
Similarly, rather than assume there is one universally ideal design system, participatory
design seeks to work with the end users to find a solution that works for them. Deconstructing
their everyday use patterns, the users or participants become more self-reflexive of the role of
technology. In turn, designers become more aware of the habits, processes, and desires of the
participants, thus creating a collectively agreed upon model. As Fowles (2000) describes the
process, it is about transforming a “symmetry of ignorance” between the designer and
participants into a “symmetry of knowledge”, in which both groups of individuals understand
each other and can better inform the final design system or objects. Through dialogue, both
participants and designers work towards a more nuanced understanding of technology's role
within a particular social or workplace milieu. From there, teams can co-design and plan a final
solution or system.
The process of agreement itself however is not a simple task, and reflects many of the
competing democratic notions of participation. Mirroring the division between Mouffe’s
“agonistic” model and Habermas’s “consensus model”, participatory designers have debated

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the relationship between a “conflict perspective” and a “harmony perspective” (Gregory, 2003,
p. 27). As Kyng (1998) argued, “if the inevitable conflicts are pushed to the side or ignored in
the rush toward an immediately workable solution, that system may be dramatically less useful
and continue to create problems” (p. 23). So by incorporating conflict into the process,
designers get a better sense of the full range of participant desires and issues. Rather than
erase particular voices or outlier experiences, Kyng and others argue that the designer must be
attuned to the complex and contradictory perspectives that arise from the participant range. In
many ways, this attention to a diversity of groups mirror the goals of the Occupy movement.
Rather than accepting a unified solution or identity, these radical forms of democracy open up
to explore the inner tensions and intersectional identities of groups.
Indeed, a number of participatory designers, such as Carl DiSalvo, Thomas Markussen,
and Erling Björgvinsson have directly referenced the theories of Chantal Mouffe in their design
work. Thomas Markussen’s notion of “design activism” and DiSalvo’s concept (and now book)
Adversarial Design (2012) draws heavily on the theories of Mouffe and agonistic design.
Veteran Scandinavian designers Björgvinsson et al. (2012) proposed the concept of “agonistic
participatory design” in an article of the same name. But while they directly incorporate the
theories and terms of Mouffe, they claim, “it may be noticed that this “agonistic” view on
democracy is very much in line with the early Scandinavian model of participatory design
(Bjerknes et al 1987, Ehn 1988) and struggles for democracy at work” (Björgvinsson et al.,
2012, p. 48). So rather than disrupting the field of participatory design, Mouffe’s arguments
offer a deeper systematic articulation of democratic notions that were foundational to
participatory design’s development as a political and methodological imperative.
Especially as participatory design moves into greater public spaces away from the
workplace, designers are met with increasingly complex and plural publics. The very notion of
end users becomes more slippery and multidimensional. The diversity of participants must

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match the diversity of potential future users. As the notion of Thing indicates, the design
process is about the social assemblage as much as it is a reference to the final artifact or
object. The collaborative process itself must be assembled in such a way that is representative
of the community of end users in present and future configurations.

V. Participatory Design Strategies

A. Infrastructuring - Building Time and Space

The concept of infrastructuring (Karasti, 2014; Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013; Björgvinsson
et al., 2012; Karasti & Syrjänen, 2004) has been developed to represent the continuously
changing and long-term uses of technological design - along with their ongoing participation
and collaboration. As Björgvinsson et al. (2012) claim, “infrastructure is a central issue since
innovation today, to a large degree, demands extensive collaboration over time and among
many stakeholders” (p. 43). Infrastructuring then is an emphasis on the temporal dimensions of
collaborations, rather than just the spatial sites (e.g. workplaces, labs, galleries, etc.) that are
the focus in community art. While community identity and practices are deeply tied to place,
their exact configurations and range of participants change over time. Especially when
considering urban environments, individual work/life choices (on a micro-level) and
urban/property developments (on a macro-level) interact to form an ever changing patchworks
of cultures and institutions. As Per Linde (2014) argues, “those publics, because they are
numerous and diverse, are emerging rather than specified in constitutions, blueprints, or
construction plans” (p. 269). The formation of publics and communities - undefined by working
practices - is highly dynamic and changing within an urban environment.

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The long-term, strategic emphasis of infrastructuring also indicates a larger separation
in art versus design practices, in which the latter may aim for practical incorporation of
technology rather than single events or exhibitions. As the earlier Christopher Le Dantec and
Carl DiSalvo quote suggests, infrastructuring processes must “include participants not present
during the initial design” (p. 241). Thus, rather than creating temporal performances, this
process is focused on creating long-term and modular systems for continuous interaction and
improvement. As technology designs are adopted by a set of users, new and unforeseen
issues may arise, warranting a reexamination or redesign. For example, the UTOPIA project
lasted 5 years in order to really flesh out and test the interfaces and workstations for the Nordic
graphics workers. Infrastructuring argues then that structures for long-term continuous
collaboration should continue even beyond the original project timeframe.
Additionally, infrastructuring argues that design work and participant formation should
be built upon pre-existing community activities, organizations, and social relationships. As
Karasti (2014), a leading theorist of infrastructuring, argues, “Infrastructuring emerged as a way
to advance the overarching community interests. It integrated with the communities’ ongoing
activities and was embedded in multiple contexts relevant for the communities over extended
periods” (p. 142). Rather than insert oneself for the sake of design or the designer’s intentions,
infrastructuring is meant to build upon the social activities and organizations that exist within
the community already. And in building for and with the community, the designer not only
contributes to the community’s interest but they also learn more about ongoing issues and
novel concepts beyond their professional realm. This can been seen as a foundational belief
within participatory design. Björgvinsson et al. (2010) explain how such an emphasis on
community based design challenges the very notions of technological innovation itself:

[Participatory Design] with the focus on open-ended participatory social innovation,

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challenges the hegemonic view on innovation practices. Moving from a purely
technocratic view of innovation, which is the hegemonic view today, towards judging the
value of an innovation by the degree it opens up for constructive and sustainable
questions and possibilities within a specific geographically and historically located
situation is one step in this direction. (p. 48)

So rather than value design innovation by technological efficiency and novelty,
participatory design seeks to shift values towards open and more humanistic questions relating
to community issues. Technology here is not seen as a universal tool, but rather tangled in a
complicated assemblage of specific cultural values and social relationships. The argument
seeks a nuanced, and somewhat incremental, notion of innovation that not only works to solve
diverse problem sets but also to raise long-term questions and self-reflexive practices and
participants. Part of the role of the designer then is to provide “tools for ideation and
expression” (Sanders & Stappers, 2008, p. 12) that empower participants to create design
solutions and concepts, which lead to an overall greater critical insight about the design world
around them. Infrastructuring is partly capacity building in an overall effort to create a network
of community designers and innovators.

B. Malmö Living Lab: Scandinavian Social Networks and Novel Designs

Some participatory design projects focus less on technological devices and more on
building social relationships and the social capital of community groups. In this section I’ll
focus on two examples that represent both capacity building and technological intervention.
Both projects spanned over multiple years are part of the Malmö “living lab” (Ehn, Nilsson, &
Topgaard, 2014), a concept originated at MIT (Eriksson, Niitamo, & Kulkki, 2005) which is

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considered a “kind of participatory lab “in the wild” (p. 8). Rather than an autonomous space of
academic or industry research, living labs are long-term, open innovation spaces for
experimenting with everyday citizens and in the context of their community. Malmö is the third
largest city in Sweden, known for its transformation from an industrial city to a “knowledge
city”. But as Emilson, Hillgren, and Seravalli (2014) point out, it is also known for its segregated
immigrant sections which have high rates of child poverty, unemployment, and tension with
authorities - sometimes leading to rioting. Malmö university faculty and graduate students, lead
by Anders Emilson, Per-Anders Hillgren, and Anna Seravalli sought out to create a “Living Lab
the Neighborhood” project to empower immigrant women. In the second project, Per Linde
and Karin Book lead a team to work with youth to create mobile devices for urban
interventions.
Starting a participatory culture from scratch is complicated and presumptuous. As with
many of the participatory design projects, including my own collaborative Leimert Phone
Company project (described in the next section), the Living Lab designers sought out pre-
existing networks to collaborate with. They established a relationship with the Herrgård’s
Women’s Association (HWA), which was founded in 2002 by immigrant women who felt
excluded from Swedish society. The organization at the time included a network of
approximately 400 members (200 are children) with backgrounds from Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, and
Afghanistan. Rather than form around preconceived national identities, the HWA formed as a
“matter of concern” around feelings of marginalization from dominant Swedish society
(Emilson, Hillgren, & Seravalli, 2014, p. 43). They formed a counterpublic (Warner 2002) across
languages and culture through their collective and self-conscious sense of being on the
periphery of mainstream public life.
The collective of designers then sought about to build strategies and tactics around the
common issues, goals, and desires of the group. After extended conversations and meetings,

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they began a three-year collaboration from 2010-2013. Based on the needs of the group, the
collaboration did not so much create technological designs but rather created social networks
and cultural bridges. The HWA wanted to participate in the larger Swedish society and to be
valued for their own cultural beliefs.
The larger collaborative process (Emilson et al., 2014, pp. 43-51) was broken down into
6 sections:

1.) Prototype 1 - The group created a catering service to sell their traditional dishes and
profit from their unique contributions to Swedish society. After initial orders, the service
did not come to fruition due to miscommunications with potential clients.
2.) Prototype 2 - The group worked with NGOs and a media company “Nice Planet” to
create social events for refugee children. Refugee children met with the HWA around
computer games and food, creating social support for those from war-torn countries.
The event was emotionally intense but overall rewarding for participants and
established a deeper network with the NGOs.
3.) Friendly Hacking 1 - The group met with civil servants to learn how to better interface
with local municipalities. Members of both groups went on hiking excursions and
engaged in discussions about cultural differences.
4.) Friendly Hacking 2 - The group linked up with a female entrepreneurial group called
Project Women Mike. Mike invited the HWA participants to come up with business
plans, developed upon their dreams and aspirations. While HWA almost gained funding
through the process, their relationship ultimately broke down. Mike thought the HWA
was too slow and that individual members needed to pitch their own work rather than
always rely on the collective identity.

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5.) Friendly Hacking 3 The group participated in and applied to be a part of Social
Innovation Incubator, looking for opportunities to directly engage with city developers
and municipal leaders. Though they created strong relationships, the Social Innovation
Incubator ultimately accepted more established entrepreneurial groups.
6.) Friendly Hacking 4 The group worked with civil servants to ultimately create a report
about reassessing multicultural values and how development is measured.
The long-term process represented the notion of “infrastructuring” for extended
collaboration and capacity building. Rather than a tactical project that focuses on
performances or exhibitions, this project represents a long-term strategy for building capacity.
However, in comparison to most participatory design processes, the end results were not in
the form of particular technological designs. The three year infrastructuring project became
almost purely focused on capacity building, bridging culture, and weaving together
relationships between publics. Instead of designing technological objects, they were
“designing conditions for the social” (Emilson et al., 2014). Unfortunately, many of their
initiatives did not come to fruition but rather highlighted the very structural reasons that the
HWA felt marginalized in the first place. The final report created with civil servants highlighted
and captured this sense of separation, exploring the ways in which alternative cultural values,
senses of community, and temporalities should be considered in supporting their citizens. The
Mike entrepreneurial response was particularly striking. Rather than celebrate the HWA’s sense
of collective identity, they suggested a more neoliberalist model of individual goals, agendas,
and businesses. The HWA group collaboration made apparent persisting cultural divides,
revealing the underlying social beliefs that drive economic opportunities. Nevertheless, the
process gave the HWA access to new social networks, deepened relationships with local
NGOs, and a gave them a better sense of how to navigate the socio-economics opportunities

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of Swedish society.
The next project more explicitly focuses on design objects and urban interventions.
Working with immigrant youth, many of whom were interested in music production, the project
teams collaborated to create working devices for intervening into urban space through mobile
and bluetooth technology. Inspired by tactical media (discussed in Chapter 2), Linde and Book
(2014) started a collaborative group that sought to use media as “a way of temporarily
appropriating places within the city space for a variety of different groups, at times questioning
hierarchical structures of ownership and public place” (p. 278). Similar to the concerns of the
women’s group in the previous project, the immigrant youth reported feeling often marginalized
in dominant society and left without a representational space to call their own. Music was a
form in which they were able to establish their identity and create space.
Utilizing bluetooth technologies through a process of collaborative design, the group
came up with two main devices: The BluePromo and The BlukeBox. Both prototypes pushed
music into public spaces. The BluePromo distributed the youth’s hip hop songs on public
buses by installing a bluetooth box onto the bus, which riders could access via their mobile
phones. The BlukeBox created a device which used bluetooth to play their own songs on
public jukeboxes. In both instances, the designs spoke to the deeper goals of making their
voices heard and publicly distributing their music.
The group actually worked with the public bus service to test and potentially install the
The BluePromo devices on the bus. The goal was that the devices could be synced to the
particular route and neighborhood, offering riders access to unique and local hip-hop tracks.
Ultimately, the city bus service did not permanently install the devices due to questions over
who owned the music once on the bus and who would curate the content. Nevertheless, the
group had created a working device that had empowered their sense of ownership over both
technology and urban space. As Linde and Book (2014) explain, “[w]hat emerged was a

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tactical thinking within the community, where it was continuously experimented with how these
place-specific media streams could be used as a tactic for appropriating urban places for a
short while” (p. 284). The process then created new frameworks for how community
participants imagined their environment and their place within it.
As technology - like mobile devices - becomes embedded into the everyday, there are
greater opportunities for empowerment and risks for entrapment. Devices can further lead to
hyper consumerism and distraction, or it could offer new augmented manners of engaging with
the world. What the previous project shows is how technology can be democratized. And in
turn, that democratization affects the ways in which citizens engage and participate in their
social surroundings and urban environments. Before concluding this section, one more
example is offered to provide additional strategies for incorporating technology into community
planning and urban development.

C. Participatory Chinatown

Participatory Chinatown is a design project launched in 2010 in Boston’s Chinatown.
Rather than aim to simply design a technological object, the collaboration used technology as
a tool for engaging communities and planning the future of their neighborhood. The project is a
collaboration between the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC), Emerson
College, Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), and Muzzy Lane. As we saw with Ride
South LA in Chapter 2, these types of collaborations can help deepen ongoing work and
provide needed support for the multiple various agendas towards a larger public good. For
example, in the video on the website, Janelle Chan from ACDC explains the need to make
planning processes more effective and inclusive for community members. In the project video
(Engagement Lab, n.d.), Eric Gordon of Emerson College sees the process as a way of testing

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out a “new way of engaging democratic process through the affordances of technology
gaming and social networking.” The ultimate goal then is using technology to deepen and
widen the process of urban planning.
The process works by having large, diverse groups of the community come together in
a room and play a 3D game based on their neighborhood. The game provides a complex
model of the area while provoking game goals that require problem-solving. The players begin
to think more critically about the space and how it might be rearranged as they work through it
“procedurally” (as discussed in Chapter 1 with Bogost). Moreover, the participants are in a
shared hybrid digital-physical space and often talk out issues and problems that they
encountered in the game or were inspired by real life.
The “real life” element is important because the model is tied to their own environment
and allows a mental dialogue between their own memories and the game. Thus the game
model is scaffolded upon their own “environmental image” or cognitive model of the area. The
game additionally is accessible to others in the room (unlike Kevin Lynch’s mental map) and
becomes a shared reference point for structuring dialogue. Because not all of the participants
speak English, there is a physical translator present and translation in the game. Since the
game experience is largely non-linguistic, it is accessible and shareable across language
divides. What this process proves then is the power of computational systems and procedural
models to augment both individual cognition and collective conversation.
As we learn from the top-down modernist urban planning failures of the past,
participatory design processes offer an opportunity for direct community engagement and
dialogue. University labs and practitioners here have an unique opportunity to leave the “ivory
tower” and directly dialogue with local publics. Moreover, there is the potential to act as an
intermediary between multiple community, public, and private groups, finding ways to
negotiate the often competing agendas. In the next section, I will lay out my own collaborative

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university-community work in which we co-design and prototype urban devices towards
planning the future of Leimert Park. While the designs are often speculative, working with the
community to interface with the city created real changes in the neighborhood’s design.

VI. The Leimert Phone Company

In 2012, I co-founded the Leimert Phone Company (LPC) design collaborative with
University of Southern California (USC) Professor François Bar, then-PhD student Benjamin
Stokes, and filmmaker/artist Ben Caldwell. Caldwell owns and operates an art center in Leimert
Park - a neighborhood about 3 miles from USC - known as the hub of African-American music
and art in Los Angeles. Our group formed shortly after Metro announced (following community
pressure) to add a Leimert Park neighborhood station on the new subway line that would
connect the LAX international airport with downtown Los Angeles. While the station brought
exciting possibilities, the neighborhood would also become exposed to outside investment,
influence, and possible cultural displacement. The LPC established in response around this
“matter of concern” of gentrification and set up to reinforce the neighborhood’s cultural identity
through urban design interventions.
Initially, our group transformed a payphone into a street-side kiosk that could share
neighborhood stories, distribute local music, and serve as a public karaoke machine. But the
collaboration expanded and transformed as the collective became more fluid. New members
and stakeholders joined the core team, rotating in and out from across disciplines and
community networks. The collective built upon these networks, infrastructuring for long-term
participation and planning. In the process, a constellation of interrelated urban design objects
emerged.

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We facilitated the formation of hybrid teams bringing students and community
members together to co-design “urban furniture”: a newspaper box turned into a digital archive
of local art and history; a bus bench became a drum machine for people to make music
together; a public display became a poetry board and shared art canvas; a planter box used
networked sensors to update neighbors about plants’ watering needs via social media. Each
was designed to resonate with community issues and desires. Through dialogue, agonism, and
unworking, a new collaborative “living lab” formed to tackle complicated issues and “matters
of concern”. Our collective developed a methodology that built upon community art and
participatory design in order to prototype and plan urban technology. As a result of our design
process, we also contributed to organizing and successfully installing a public pedestrian plaza
with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT).

A. Matters of Concern and Backstory

The voice (re)claims black space. It demands public spatial arrangements that enhance
black American citizenship. The issue of space grows increasingly critical...in an era
where white privatization shamelessly masquerades as communitarianism.
-Paul Robinson, “Race, Space, and the
Evolution of Black Los Angeles” (2010, p. 40)

The current population shift in US cities toward the urban core has created an exciting
and delicate time for urban innovation and design. Attempts to bring new technology can easily
aggravate disparities, undermining local culture and disproportionately benefiting newcomers.
The increasing investment in smart cities and public transportation - particularly in car-centric
Los Angeles - provide greater access to mobility but also increase property values and

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contribute to processes of gentrification. The promises of the future city may come at the
expense of the past.
Our design collective sought to help retain cultural values and embody the values of
local stakeholders with new technological and social assemblages. The goal was to create in
urban space a "socially-embedded design" (Stokes, Bar, Baumann, & Caldwell, 2014). Our
initial designs were built upon the physical forms of urban space, or "urban furniture" (Rubegni
et al., 2008) such as bus benches and pay phones. Community participants appropriated
communication technologies (Bar, Weber, & Pisani, 2016) by re-purposing familiar urban
objects as community hubs. By intervening in the built environment, community participants
were able to see infrastructures as malleable and flexible (Karasti, 2014). Moreover, our
process revealed that each design object was not a single, autonomous form. They were
socio-material assemblages - or Things - which generate relationships to people and places.
The design agenda recognized the neighborhood not merely as geo-coordinates, but as
a place full of rich history and complex social and community dynamics. Socially-embedding is
often best served in public space, where neighbors and strangers are pushed to interact. We
sought to directly design around and intervene in public space as the subway would surely
bring an influx of outsiders. The goal was to push design beyond basic compatibility with the
built environment, and to begin actively shaping the collective experience of public space. Any
urban technological design must account for the "messy human situations" of that space
(Bilandzic & Venable, 2011; Baskerville, Pries-Heje, & Venable, 2007). Social-embedding is a
deliberate stance toward technology as part of the neighborhood fabric. When the
neighborhood and technology are one socio-technical system, the technology's future is
subject to urban planning.
The stakes were particularly high for the preservation of Leimert Park, which has
become a center for black culture and arts in Los Angeles. Leimert Park is a planned

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neighborhood, with a central park and fountain, a historic theater and a corridor of small shops.
Initially the planned neighborhood was white-only and used legal housing covenants to
maintain its homogenous culturally identity. The issue of spatial freedom and mobility has long
plagued the black experience of Los Angeles. Despite the “Golden Era” of Black Los Angeles
from 1890-1920, in which African Americans had comparatively more job options and civil
liberties than the rest of post-reconstruction US, much of LA’s black population has
experienced structural antagonism (Bonacich, Smallwood-Cuevas, Morris, Pitts, & Bloom,
2010). During Los Angeles’s exponential development of the 1920s-1930s, strict racial housing
covenants were established and enforced to keep the black population segregated to the
south of the city (Bonacich, Smallwood-Cuevas, Morris, Pitts, & Bloom, 2010). What had once
been a desegregated haven, became doubly bitter as black communities were forcefully
partitioned out of the core of the city. Even once the covenants were lifted, the first few black
families that moved from the black-designated Central Avenue area into white neighborhoods
were met by violent mobs or fires set to their homes. Overtime, this spatial antagonism
became less structural and moved to the level of everyday citizens, but issues in employment
opportunity and policing lead to the 1965 Watts and the 1992 uprisings.
Leimert Park and the surrounding Crenshaw corridor became a predominantly black
neighborhood by the 1960s. The founding of black artistic spaces like the Brockman Art
Gallery and the World Stage Jazz Center in Leimert Park were established as key nodes in
Black cultural production. Then, the 1965 Watts uprising scared off many of the remaining
white residents (Isoardi, 2006) who sold to black homeowners. Today, 79.6% of Leimert Park’s
population identifies as Black/African-American (LA Times, n.d.) and the neighborhood is
renowned for its history. As a cultural hub, the neighborhood stands out as a beacon for
African-American culture and arts -- home at various points to Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles and
former Mayor Tom Bradley (Exum & Guiza-Leimert, 2012, p. 9). Filmmaker John Singleton has

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called it "the black Greenwich Village" (Lee, 2010, p. 119).
The population is now greying, with one of the highest percentages of residents over 65
in LA County (LA Times, n.d.). Yet youth are also a constant presence, attracted to emerging
and inexpensive art, music, and open space. The future feels uncertain as a new generation
will take on the legacy of the neighborhood, just as it is becoming connected to the larger Los
Angeles public transit system. The next 5-15 years are expected to be full of growth, but the
cultural identity depends on maintaining black ownership and creating technological innovation
that reinforces that identity. In order to tackle such as complicated and multidimensional
“wicked problem” (Buchanan, 1992), it would take a team of diverse skill sets and cultural
knowledge to create unique and appropriate design proposals.

B. Infrastructuring and Fluid Groups

In our five and half years of collaboration, The Leimert Phone Company has adopted
the Participatory Design terminology of infrastructuring to emphasize the long-term
collaboration as well as social scaffolding. Seeking to start a participatory culture from scratch
is dangerously presumptive, especially given the power dynamics of historically marginalized
LA communities like Leimert Park. Instead, we sought to tap existing cultural momentum in
hopes of sustaining participatory practices. Our strategies sought to scaffold the design work
upon previous social relationships and urban structures (Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013). Rather than
designing the future of a neighborhood from scratch, we aimed to leverage its cultural assets
and material realities. Our scaffolding has three components: (a) Classes and workshops built
on Kaos’ and USC’s networks, (b) By repurposing pre-existing urban furniture, we can
intervene in public space while taking advantage of public familiarity with these objects. (3) In
phase 2, our Tactical Urbanism class coincided with the City’s open call for pedestrian plazas,

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providing a longer-term focus and potential implementation. The process developed
organically through dialogue, serendipity, and opportunity. Along the way, theoretical
discussions around tactical urbanism, community art, design fiction, world building, and
participatory design fed into our various strategies. Indeed, our collective engagement with
participatory design concepts and projects strengthened after we presented our work
(Baumann, Stokes, Bar, & Caldwell, 2016) at the Participatory Design Conference in Aarhus,
Denmark in 2016. Though the design collective work is presented here often in a clean linear
arc, the evolution and infrastructuring was much more ad hoc.
Our collaboration started as a multi-dimensional mix of networks tied to two central
nodes: the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL) and Ben Caldwell’s Kaos Network art center in
Leimert Park. Rather than a preconceived community tied to labor or identity, each node
represents “communities of practice” tied to particular projects and initiatives. Each central
node is constantly changing as participants (usually students and technologists at the AIL and
local residents and artists at Kaos) come and go dependent upon which projects, subgroups,
or initiatives they are temporarily part of. Participation is often driven by particular affinities,
goals, and availability. While we seek to maintain a core group of members, the working
assemblages often represent a “fluid group” of participants.
Ben Caldwell’s Kaos Network center has a rich history of community art and music
initiatives. Caldwell initially became known as part of the “LA Rebellion” in the 1970s, the first
group of African-American filmmakers in the University of California Los Angeles’s MFA
program. Then in the 1980s, Caldwell expanded his practice to establish the Kaos Network
community and performing arts center in Leimert Park. While most of the other music
establishments in the neighborhood focused on jazz, Caldwell opened his doors to a young
budding hip-hop scene. Initially called “Project Blowed” - and more recently renamed
“Bananas” - the monthly event is the longest running open-mic hip-hop event in the world

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(Exum & Guiza-Leimert, 2012, p. 85). Notable rappers such as Aceyalone, Jurassic 5, and
Abstract Rude established themselves at Koas, paving the way for the new generation of
young rappers in the area.
The initial LPC formation built upon this “community of practice” by emphasizing a
shared language of remix, repurposing, and re-appropriating (Figure 19). Initial workshop
participant formations included recruiting young rappers by attending Bananas and asking
them to freestyle about payphones. By legitimizing technology in terms of culture, we resisted
the temptation to cede leadership to technologists. Everyone was invited to participate, and to
legitimize a range of complementary skill sets. Maintaining such cognitive diversity (Page, 2008)
is essential for addressing the wicked problems at the heart of most social issues and urban
planning.

Figure 19: Leimert Phone Company begin with workshops to repurpose payphones.

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Additionally, our project scaffolded upon pre-existing technologies and urban forms.
From phase 1’s payphone project to phase 2’s constellation (Baumann, Stokes, Bar, &
Caldwell, 2017) of urban furniture, technological artefacts were tied to familiar objects. The
design process and potential objects were thus more inclusive because they minimized the
reliance on new interfaces (Rossitto, Bogdan, & Severinson-Eklundh, 2014). Instead of new
interfaces and rituals, teams could repurpose or reinvent older ones – tapping into latent
potentials. In the next chapter, I will address how this becomes complicated once designing for
emerging and speculative technologies. But for now, we will begin with the payphones and
urban furniture.
Gaps in technological expertise are a major concern for planning any public technology.
When technological divides do not involve community members or team partners in significant
collaboration, then power is relegated technological experts. Even in community-based
solutions, some technological literacy is needed in order to maximize the potential of group
members in the design process. Combinations of old and new tech can help shift to the social
side of socio-technical systems. Without an explicit focus on the old, the new can easily take
over. We found that an archaeological approach proves useful, alongside low-cost
technologies of the present. For example, payphones can fit an entire Raspberry Pi computer
inside. To embrace the old, we also draw on design strategies of appropriation, creolization,
and even cannibalism (Bar, Weber, & Pisani, 2007; Schiavo, Rodríguez, & Vera, 2013). Moving
indirectly and iteratively can be an important approach for deepening technology literacy.

C. Phase 1 - Designing Payphones

After 14 payphones were purchased on eBay for $309 USD in total, an intensive design

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process began. To balance the university and community, weekly meetings in early 2013
alternated between the university lab and community art center. Groups formed to build
coherence by creating specific design plans. Most of the design took place in a single five-
week window. Throughout, us four founders acted as facilitators to structure the groups'
activities to build a shared knowledge base, including some basics of welding, rapid
prototyping, local music and arts, and Python programming for Raspberry Pis. The three
design plans that emerged were then showcased at a community "pitchfest" to build
stakeholder support, raise funds, and build a public constituency in support of the proposed
technology.
Altogether, the project involved roughly 30 core participants and a dozen or so
peripheral participants. This was a highly diverse group across many dimensions: it included
more than 1/3 community participants and slightly less than 2/3 university participants; it was
balanced in terms of gender and supported diverse racial and ethnic groups (56% white and
44% non-white, mostly African-American). Most were in their twenties (67%), although some
participants were in their older teens and others over 50. The university participants were
mostly graduate students and came predominantly from the Schools of Communication and
Cinematic Arts, but included several undergraduate students, alumni, and faculty with training
in computer science.
From this collaborative, three payphone plans emerged, each re-imagining the
telephone for neighborhood social goals, specifically:

1.) The "Transmedia Storytelling" group focused on ways to distribute historical or
personal stories around the neighborhood while directing participants to local
businesses with discoverable coupons.

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2.) The "Dial-A-Track" group envisioned new forms of playing and distributing local music
through the payphone portal. Tickets would also be sold to local events like “Bananas”.
3.) The "Art Buzz" group sought to publicize or help visitors navigate to local art galleries
and exhibition spaces, extending a history of what has been called "art by telephone"
(de Souza e Silva, 2004).

Taken together, the methodology has the potential to unite constituents in defining the problem
and building social capital for multiple technology solutions - following agonistic design
(Björgvinsson et al., 2012; DiSalvo, 2010) - rather than to "solve" the problem for any one social
need. Without this special care, technology design tends to identify a single "best" prototype.
By contrast, “agonistic design” can help sustain the pluralism that is necessary in planning for
multiple publics.
Indeed, there were moments of agonism throughout that highlighted larger tensions and
the conflicting voices within our stitching of communities. Specifically, one older participant
warned that blasting hip-hop from a payphone would annoy the older residents, and urged the
group to restrict payphone-amplified music to the jazz of famous (and often deceased)
residents. A debate ensued over who should be represented in public space and whether
technology could ease friction in the selection process. Like the conflicts with Ahearn’s piece in
the South Bronx (discussed in Section II) there is often an intergenerational divide within a
community. Collective identity is always contested and neighborhoods themselves are
fundamentally imagined - just like nation states (Anderson, 2006). Strong neighborhoods have
powerful identities that residents share, perform, and take collective action around. The implicit
success of the debates in Leimert is that the terms of the debate around the neighborhood
identity aligned with community formation and planning, with its contestations over "who we
are" and where to go next.

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The emphasis on collective storytelling in forming identity became a central topic during
the public “pitchfest”, which was directed to additional community members and invited
judges. Because community identity and publics are multidimensional, the pitchfest was a
chance to dialogue and receive feedback from residents outside of our core collaborative
network. Groups played their design fiction videos (which will be discussed shortly) to exhibit
the potential social rituals and user experiences of their payphone designs. One of the invited
judges, local business owner and former UCLA Vice Chancellor CZ Wilson, claimed, "I think
what we're missing... is a narrative. People can't find meaning out of Leimert Park anymore."
He argued that Leimert Park was at a crossroads and its identity was less coherent than it was
in the past. Anthony Maddox, a local resident and USC professor echoed the sentiment,
stating, “I think people might actually want to get off the Metro and come to Leimert Park...But
the next thing is not just stories of the past. But stories of the present and stories of the future.”
Both argued that the community was in a process of transition and that residents needed to
define and take ownership of the future identity.
The final pitchfest then sparked larger discussions about the makeup and identity of the
imagined community of the neighborhood, in response to the encroaching subway stop. Our
teams’ projects represented attempts to bridge the past and the future, providing tools of
innovation to both young artist and older residents. The project teams formed around shared
matters of concern of cultural preservation as well as personal affinities. Many of the young
musicians for example, such as in the “dial a track” group pushed for distributing local music
as a novel way to get their own music recognized and out in the world - similar to the work in
Malmö. The payphone phase also established a working relationship with community
collaborators for future projects.

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D. Phase 2 - Designing a Constellation of Urban Objects

The next phase of the Leimert Phone Company took place a year later, in 2014, around
a “Tactical Media/Urbanism” course that I co-taught with Professor François Bar and Ben
Caldwell. Rather than focus on redesigning a single object, we expanded to think about a
constellation of interactive urban devices. Constellations have been defined previously by
Rossitto, Bogdan, and Severinson-Eklundh (2014) as something that emerges when temporary
project teams adopt various technology devices and platforms. Here, we expand that notion to
include open-ended publics (DiSalvo, Lukens, Lodato, Jenkins, & Kim, 2014; Dantec & DiSalvo,
2013; Björgvinsson et al., 2012; Dewey, 1954) and wicked problems related to urban space. By
creating a constellation of devices, each object complements and multiplies the possible social
assemblages and civic engagements. Additionally, the public exhibition of the design concepts
became part of an effort to successfully install a pedestrian plaza in the neighborhood with the
Los Angeles Department of Transit (LADOT).
The Tactical Urbanism class had 14 undergraduate (and 1 graduate) Media Arts
students and 9 community members, with others occasionally joining when available. The
teams worked together for 15 weeks to create 4 distinct designs:

1.) The “Beat Bench” group created a bus bench with a drum machine embedded inside,
allowing residents and visitors to collaboratively create music while waiting for public
transit.
2.) The “Grow It!” group imagined socially networked garden planters, where citizens can
monitor a public garden’s health and work together to share responsibilities for its care.
3.) The “Sankofa Display” group repurposed a public display case to have magnetic poetry
boards and painting canvases for creative public collaboration.

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4.) The “Learn It!” group repurposed a donated LA Times Newspaper Box to act as touch-
screen display for accessing an archive of Leimert Park’s artistic history.

By designing a range of devices, our process scaled up to engage a larger potential
range of publics. One key feature to this iteration was diving deeper around notions of “contact
zones” (Sabiescu, David, van Zyl, & Cantoni, 2014), meeting points of difference across a range
of professional, ethnic, and class identities – including neighborhood outsiders/insiders.
Expanding upon agonistic design practices, we aimed to develop around points of difference,
within and outside of the group. As part of our infrastructuring process we also had to create
opportunities to scaffold previous participants’ experiences for newer, incoming participants.
Outside of group dynamics, we focused on physical contact zones and cultural contact
zones. Physical contact zones are where diverse residents and visitors come into contact
around urban objects. Each object must work in relationship to its environment, with particular
emphasis on building a shared experience of public space in a social setting. Cultural Contact
Zones are the more complicated and unpredictable elements within our system.
Neighborhoods are multi-dimensional spaces of constant contact across cultural lines and
perspectives. Each object has to be designed with consideration for a number of different
forms of cultural exchange. Scenarios and role playing are important for working through the
various possible exchanges and how they may play out.
Much like our initial payphone workshop, location was key. A large part of the initial
design process was designing in-situ (March & Raijmakers, 2008), iterating concepts while at
the intended physical site. Community team members drew upon personal experience and
observation to give meaning to place and context. Students were encouraged to recognize
their insights as “outsiders”. Design exercises sustained a negotiation between perspectives,
seeking to draw conclusions about the contact zones. How might the re-appropriated urban

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furniture reinforce, alter, or create new cultural practices in a given place?
Then designing scenarios helped to concretize the contact zone interactions and
experiment with new rituals. Groups used the scenarios to balance complex questions,
including: What engagement mechanism might gain a passerby’s attention? How would the
device communicate its usage? How would the device foster or intervene in their chosen
contact zones? What output or reward would the user most appreciate? By working through
the scenarios, teams were able to gain a better sense of the affective and embodied process of
interacting with the urban objects.
Early in the scenario sequence, teams worked to fabricate their prototypes. These
would become “endowed props” (Howard, Carroll, Murphy, & Peck, 2002) for the teams’
scenarios, their design fiction videos, and the final public event. The props helped to focus
attention for individual designs, and provide transparency across projects. Teams also
presented their prototypes to one another weekly, further spurring conversation about how the
constellation might be made more coherent and help amplify each design. The term “prop” is
deliberate, in part because the prototypes did not always physically reuse existing objects. In
particular, the bus bench and planter box groups purchased or fabricated light-weight, plastic
stand-ins for the intended industrial-strength furniture. Additionally, the degree of technological
enhancement depended upon the individual groups. The bus bench group used a Raspberry Pi
to activate drum beat buttons inserted into their bench, while the newspaper box group used
an iPad as a stand-in to simulate a customized interactive touch screen.
Sometimes the props pointed to technological ambitions, more than reality. For
example, the planter box group conceived of a device for measuring water levels in a public
garden that then sent social media updates. The planter box aspired to connect new networks
around shared gardening practices. This proved beyond the skillset of group members, but the
prop and the design fiction video articulated the concept for the public to consider – and seek

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out new volunteers with the missing skills.

VII. The Leimert Phone Company: Interdisciplinary Strategies

A. Design Fiction Videos in Both Phases

In both phases of the project, drama prototyping, scenario creation, and design fiction
were central in the experimentation and articulation of group designs. Because of the social
emphasis of our designs as well as the range of technical skills, the use of imagination, play,
and storytelling was key for creating fully realized socio-technological experiences. Additionally
as discussed in the previous section, “endowed props” were important to create a sense of the
possibility of a design when it couldn’t be fully fabricated. Videos then offer a coherent
scenario, rich with character backstory and interaction rituals, to present to the public.
During early session of Phase 1: Payphone Designs, groups would actually perform as
the payphone in order to think of the design object as socially embedded and responsive
device. Drama prototyping has previously been applied effectively for prototyping urban
furniture, including augmented swing sets for children and large public screens (Rubegni,
Memarovic, & Langheinrich, 2012). In Leimert, the performances helped to concretize weekly
deliverables and work out an embodied sense of what the social relations around the
payphones might look like. Each week groups performed their design to gain feedback from
the larger collective.
Taking the performances further, teams came up with more polished design fiction
videos based on their "scenarios". Scenarios provide a compressed means for presenting
short stories about the use of technological designs, contextualized within their setting (Iacucci

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& Kuutti, 2002). Much like the drama prototyping, scenarios were a way to concretize multiple
design concepts into an elegant example of the total user experience. In video form, scenario
prototypes allowed teams to create speculative evidence of how their design would function,
sometimes including visual effects.
With the Phase 2: Constellation groups, the design fiction videos became more
formalized and focused even more on character backstory around contact zones. In the planter
box video, the group created novel visual effects (VFX) that modeled their design. With merely
a planter box, a blinking light, and added VFX overlays, the team effectively portrayed a
socially networked plant that triggered online discussion. Cutting between characters talking
on a message board, they showed how an eventual face-to-face relationship could develop
around shared concerns for a community garden. Unlike theatrical prototyping, the format of
cinematic storytelling allows designers to collapse time and space to show long-term usage
across multiple days and socially networked people in various places.
The bus bench group did create a working prototype (while the planter box did not),
and used the video to highlight how their drum bench could create positive relationships at
contact zones. In the video, a local resident and tourist are waiting awkwardly at a bus bench
together (Figure 20). But after one person discovers the buttons, the two participants bond
over the playful musical collaboration. The urban furniture is thus transformed to better
alleviate social tension. By turning these designs into “diegetic prototypes” (Kirby, 2010;
Bleecker, 2009), the social relations of the storyworld (diegesis) give new meaning to the
design.

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Figure 20: Design fiction videos: beat bench used to create relationship with strangers (upper) and
socially networked garden used to share responsibility amongst locals (bottom).

In the end, each group video (bench, planter, display, newspaper box) addressed a
different need within a larger series of complex social issues underlying the public space in the
neighborhood. Like the props, the videos helped to make each project visible to the others and
stir conversation about the constellation. For example, the groups debated how best to
position their objects to redirect pedestrian flows. This in turn led us to strategize the
constellation and their placement within the space of the neighborhood plaza.

226

B. Tactical Urbanism and Reshaping the Streets

A distinct goal and result of Phase 2: Constellations was the emphasis on “tactical
urbanism” and intervention. As discussed in Chapter 2, “Tactical Urbanism” (Lydon & Garcia,
2015) is a growing movement for bottom-up planning by direct interventions into the built
environment. In contrast to careful master plans, the technique focuses on low-cost (or
temporary) interventions by residents and allies. The groups’ urban objects were particularly
chosen because they were underutilized or could be enhanced through re-invention (much like
our original payphone).
To conclude the Tactical Urbanism class, groups installed their prototypes during a
monthly “art walk” in front of the Kaos Network art center. The event was a way to test the
constellation as a whole, gain feedback from the public, and observe any emergent behavior.
We also worked with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) to temporarily
close the street to car traffic during the event in order to give the community a sense of what a
permanent pedestrian-only plaza could be like.
As another form of scaffolding, our design plan was strategic in working with the
LADOT. That year, LADOT launched a People St. program and a citywide call for proposals.
The program sought to convert parking spaces or redundant streets into new pedestrian-
friendly spaces. The designs could include plazas, parklets, and bicycle corrals. Every proposal
required a community partnership. For the case of Leimert Park, traffic flow provided a neutral
issue to rally the community around. The quaint central area is surrounded by fast-moving
boulevards on either side of the park. Drivers often made sharp and dangerous turns into the
neighborhood to cut between the two boulevards. With a more permanent closure, our pilot

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streetscape could address the traffic concerns, and simultaneously bring prominence to the
cultural approaches invested in the urban furniture constellation.
The temporary closure event created a first-hand experience of that potential urban
intervention. Neighbors were able to momentarily step into a potential future, and decide if it
was worth supporting. The constellation of objects sequenced them through the space,
offering community activities and sites for dialogue. In particular, the bus bench team was
successful in eliciting not only direct participation but also peripheral activities. As one man
was playing a beat on the bench, a passer-by jumped in and began freestyle rapping. The
planter box team brought maps for the potential plaza and invited people to sketch out their
ideal public garden.
All four groups (and the organizers) collected signatures in support of a permanent
street closure to create a pedestrian plaza. During one day we collected 93 signatures. Later,
124 more residents signed online. Comments were frequently brief and celebratory (the most
common were “Great idea!” and “Love this!”, at 9 and 8 counts respectively). Many invoked
particular stakeholders; one local visitor said, “It’s safe for children.” Another visitor said “I like
the artwork and gardens woven into urban space.” A long-time community member stated,
“We can have a unique space here, something rarely seen in American cityscapes… If we let
this chance slip by us during this design and development stage, we’ll experience a loss that
generations after us will feel.”
As part of the application, the authors participated in an effort to gather letters of
support from local businesses (arts/crafts shops, galleries, a martial arts school, and a food co-
op) and institutions (Business Improvement District, Stakeholders Organizations, and LA City
Council). These letters emphasized how important the plaza would be to continued
improvement and redevelopment of the neighborhood – particularly as a hub for black culture.
Multiple letters also referenced the experience of our temporary plaza. The LA City Council

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President emphasized the ongoing nature in his letter, declaring that the “proposed
continuation of People Street Plaza will allow the organizers the opportunity to provide an array
of art and cultural activities.”

Figure 21: LADOT People St Plaza. Photo by Karl Baumann.

In the end, the group’s People St. application was successfully selected (Figure 21) and
the city installed a permanent pedestrian plaza. They also installed community planter boxes
and a bicycle repair stand. These elements, which once seemed imaginative but distant, have
now become a reality. The planter box does not measure water levels yet (as per the team’s
aspiration) but was nevertheless incorporated into the final construction. The repurposed
public display case was permanently established and has been adopted/transformed by the
community. While the newspaper box could not stand alone without a custom touchscreen,
the drum beat bench continues to be used within the Kaos Network art center and has been
shown at a number of events around LA, sharing local culture and stories of innovation with
outsiders.

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C. Phase 3: Complications of a Gallery Setting

Not all collaborations are easy and bringing community work to different spaces leads
to complications. In late 2013, after our original payphone design, we created a more finalized
prototype with a large speaker, touch screen display, and charging ports. With it’s bright red
color, the phone was named “Sankofa Red”. The phone had a separate unveiling and was
partially used to recruit participants for our “Tactical Urbanism” project. In 2016, after the
phone had gained some notoriety, we were invited to showcase it at a prominent Los Angeles
art show on race and skin color entitled “SKIN” at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in East
Hollywood - several miles from Leimert Park. The context of the gallery provided new
opportunities to engage with wider publics outside of the local community and university lab.
However, the notions of authorship become complicated when entering a more traditional art
gallery.
The opening night was a particular moment of reflection for the design team. Even as
the exhibit featured the designed object, Sankofa Red recruited a new line of oral histories on
race, asking visitors: “When was the first time you realized that your skin had color?”
Participants then called in to leave messages about salient experiences in their own life that
made them aware of the social dynamics or pressures related to skin color. Dozens of
intensely personal stories were gathered (e.g., “back then, it was Jim Crow law… and my
parents sat me down to tell me about the do’s and the don’ts…”). The messages were first
archived and then made accessible for future gallery goers.
Beyond sculptural object, the design acted as a provocation to begin a dialogue and
retain participants’ voices – functioning under a “dialogical” and “relational” aesthetic (Bishop
2012; Kester 2004). The gallery redesign was an attempt to align our project with the increasing
“social turn” in the arts to create collaborative, contextual, and non-commodity based art

230
(Bishop, 2012). Mirroring the participatory process itself, the installation was meant to gather
larger public input rather than position the artists/designers as sole experts on the subject.
Moreover, the installation opened an additional discursive space around race as a ‘matter of
concern’ (Björgvinsson et al., 2012). The broader art show was structured around the issue of
‘skin’ and race, and was undoubtedly intended to spark conversation. Our installation added
another dimension by providing access to past visitors and voices, reflecting a polyvocal
network and the intimate experience of audio recordings.
Because of the slippery nature of the installation object (a dynamic archive housed
within a fixed sculpture), there were issues raised around defining authorship. Despite the
increasing trend towards “dialogical art”, the institutional frame of art galleries are still largely
built around fixed art objects. This created some tension within our own group. The
accompanying wall plaque listed Ben Caldwell and three collaborators who initially fabricated
the physical elements of Sankofa Red. However, the plaque did not list the collaborators who
programmed and recorded the content, nor the larger collective who initially developed the
design.
The situation sparked debates within the group about authorship and how divisible the
project should be. While Ben Caldwell was the invited artist, the fabrication was a result of a
large network of collaborators and long-term design work. The resulting conversations lead the
team to reaffirm their commitment to representing the collective in addition to single
artists/designers, but it was no easy consensus. Indeed, the situation revealed the underlying
‘agonism’ within our own collective, echoing Björgvinsson et al. (2012) and DiSalvo (2012).
Working from different fields, disciplines and across community-university lines, there are a
variety of competing assumptions that drive the different participants within the collective. As
DiSalvo has noted, agonistic design embraces such conflicts as potentially productive for
revealing power relationships and support pluralism, rather than smoothing over problematics

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for the sake of consensus.

D. The Leimert Phone Company Reflections

Our participatory design project built relationships between the community and the
university. Positive experiences strengthened networks on both sides, and established the
foundation for expanding to new partners, reaching out to more local businesses and the
municipality. By rotating institutions, we sought to shift power from the local university to
community engagement and dialogue. Through alternating between physical sites, each place
can bring its own authentic networks. Inviting stakeholders into physical spaces, and paying
attention to their ideas, can build trust. This takes time, and in the case of university-
community relations the temporal trajectory is often long indeed. But eventually the process
should allow people to build common ground that will in turn prove useful when confronting the
really contentious issues. The Leimert case is also profoundly diagnostic, helping to identify
community priorities, issues, concerns, and desires. The importance of agonistic design
becomes increasingly important as design shifts toward urban planning, as technologies in
public space structure participation and diverse communities have varied modes of
participation.
Mixing top-down and bottom-up processes, and using low-cost interventions tied to
urban furniture, the project focused on the co-development of human and physical capital. By
creating a constellation of objects, a number of separate design teams were pushed and
supported to think about the interrelationships and the larger urban context. Each individual
urban object was understood as a Thing positioned in space and culture – the socio-material
assemblages that make it more than a single autonomous thing. Because we worked in public
space, the designs had to be flexible to address diverse publics and possible social

232
configurations. The constellation approach created a modular system of designs that
expanded horizontally, while the fluid group created a structure for ongoing participation.
Working alongside community members, this project began with urban furniture, then spiraled
outward to contact zones to sustain conversation around difficult issues of urbanism, place,
and gentrification.
Many of the project participants changed their stance over time, approaching urban
objects not as static entities but fluid sites for intervention and instruments of change. Our
framework reveals the importance of a process that builds the neighborhood capacity to plan
for local technology, and to foster the social capital, sense of belonging and efficacy that lead
to civic engagement for the long term (Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006). The process strengthened
the group to interface with the city on questions of technology and the built environment on
distinctly cultural terms. By making pre-existing infrastructures visible and creating continuity
with past technologies, this participatory design project developed infrastructuring for open-
ended and future-facing design. The objects not only help to catalyze public space in the
present, but to increase the coherence of planning for new projects in the future.
In the next chapter, I will discuss the most recent project phase Sankofa City. The
project is much more future-focused and speculative. Our designs shift away from familiar
urban objects, such as payphones and urban furniture, to emerging technologies, such as self-
driving cars and augmented reality. Scaffolding upon the previous methodologies and
networks of participants, the Sankofa City project collaborates with communities to map the
unknown contours of the future. While the future provides more freedom for playful and
personal interpretations, it creates a more complicated process of defining shared language
and visions. Drawing more heavily from science fiction, utopian thinking, and afrofuturism, this
project pushes collective imaginations to create wholly new infrastructural and social systems.

233
Conclusion

Participation is key for modeling pluralistic and democratic ideals into creative practices
like art and design. Rather than privileging the visionary position of the artist or designer,
participatory processes create collaborative relationships and cognitive diversity. Designing
around urban space - rather than specific work environments - is particularly complicated as it
is the site of multiple publics. Publics not only differ in culture, religion, and ethnicity, but also
age and mobility. The unique challenge of urban and technological design make participatory
projects all the more exciting, as they seek to grapple with the multidimensional problems of
cultural identity, accessibility, and development. As technology becomes increasingly infused
into urban environments, the potentials exist for both augmenting public participation or further
reinforcing pre-existing socioeconomic hierarchies. Participatory processes seek to empower
local publics and provide a greater sense of ownership and common goods.
The emphasis on art and design are important because they represent forms of
aesthetic communication that link socio-cultural systems with infrastructural and technological
systems. It is through art and design that populations find meaning and negotiate identity in
public space. Some of the practices analyzed in this chapter move beyond visual
representational strategies to dialogical and agnostic tactics that force conversations across
seemingly antagonistic or competing social groups. The aesthetic object becomes transformed
into a social object. Within art, these processes often use temporary and semi-autonomous
spaces that act as micro-utopias to suspend participant identities in order to truly
communicate with each other. The formation of both these spaces and the community
identities are complicated and multidimensional. Kester (2004) has pointed out the ways in
which such spaces can never fully be separated from their surroundings, while Kwon (2004)

234
has critiqued how many social art work relies on preconceived or workplace community
identities.
While community, relational, and dialogical art is often temporary and performative,
participatory design has developed to work on long-term strategies for open-ended
collaboration. As the Malmö living labs projects show (Ehn, Nilsson, & Topgaard, 2014), some
projects are also about building dialogue and social relations while others are intended to build
prototypes and design objects. Indeed, our Leimert Phone Company seeks to create design
objects that embody local cultural norms and social activities while facilitating social
interactions across a range of groups. By intervening in urban spaces, the projects seek to
incrementally alter the built environment with an awareness of long-term transformations and
future ambitions. Rather than top-down master planning, this form of urban technological
planning is bottom-up and deeply committed to local participation and the messy, contested
nature of democracy. While we can envision grand designs for the future, the actual process of
creating futures is much more complicated and must contend with diverse publics and
communities, each containing their own desires, issues, and concerns. Through participation
and co-creation, we can come closer to creating a pluralistic future that embodies the
complexity of our societies.

235

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Chapter 4: Building the Future:
Utopia, Anticipatory Design, and Sankofa City

Introduction

Utopia’s very refusal to be nailed down and made real is what powers it as an “imaginal
machine” — a technology for freeing our thinking from the prison house of the possible
and for imagining alternatives ourselves.
- Stephen Duncombe, Open Utopia (More, 2012, p. L)

This final chapter looks to utopic thinking, science fiction, and Afrofuturism to build a
theoretical model for aspirational design. The idea of utopia has existed for over 500 years, yet
it has gone through multiple conceptual changes. Recently scholars and activists have looked
to philosopher Ernst Bloch to reclaim utopia not as a distant place, but as a praxis for building
a better world. Similarly, Stephen Duncombe has pointed to the need for opening up utopia to
create a more democratic model of the concept. Indeed past models of utopia, especially
when wedded to technology, are often conceived of as perfect systems designed from the top-
down. Within Afrofuturist and science-fiction writings, such as Samuel Delany and Octavia
Butler, utopia is a bottom-up process of collective pursuits of pleasure or community building.
Such writings have in turn been used to inspire real-world activism and organizing. For
example, adrienne maree brown has developed “emergent strategies” for community
organizing and gardening based on Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993). But utopia can also
be reclaimed from mass media, as Henry Jenkins and his research team have explored the
concept of the “civic imagination”, which refers to how activists use fiction and popular cultural
storyworlds to gather public support around political issues.

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Inspired by these efforts, alongside participatory speculative design and world building,
I will map out a nascent methodology for anticipatory design. This method was tested and
developed in 2017 through a three-month community workshop series and design fiction film
in Leimert Park, a historically black neighborhood in South Los Angeles. Building upon four
years of participatory design workshops with the Leimert Phone Company, the Sankofa City
project seeks to empower local residents to imagine the future of their neighborhood in line
with their collective desires and cultural traditions. Community residents worked with university
students to imagine and prototype a sustainable, pluralistic future in which self-driving cars
and augmented reality serve the great public good of the neighborhood. The process was
insightful for developing novel concepts while also revealing points of disagreement and
alienation tied to new technologies. Inspired by agonistic models of democracy, the project
attempted to embrace - or at least address - outlying dissent in the collaborative process. The
final results were powerful visions that tied local culture to a utopic speculative future and
continues to inspire public dialogue. As a culmination of this dissertation, this project brings
together the disparate strands, theories, and methods into a comprehensive process of making
futures; and not just envisioning them but practically making steps to involve everyday citizens
to incrementally test out and build around their desires for their neighborhood and city.

I. Theories of Utopian Praxis

A. Searching for Utopia: Thomas More to Ernst Bloch

Utopian consciousness wants to look far into the distance, but ultimately only in order to
penetrate the darkness so near it of the just lived moment.
- Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope (1986, p. 13)

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The term utopia was coined by Thomas More in 1516. The word means nowhere,
hinting at the impossibility of a perfect ideal society. His book’s narrative consists of a fictional
interview with a recent traveler returning from a visit to the island nation of Utopia. Separated
from contemporary society, the island community is able to reach an ideal state that has never
before been seen by outsiders. The interviewee is reliant on the traveler’s tales and
interpretations to make sense of this alternative society. Rather than just a purely fictional tale,
Fredric Jameson argues that More’s book is a rhetorical tool to argue for or against certain
belief systems and models of social relations. For example, More’s (1965) traveler writes, “Thus
I am firmly persuaded that there is no way property can be equitably and justly distributed or
the affairs of mortal men managed so as to make them happy unless private property is utterly
abolished” (p. 46). Throughout the book, he makes implicit and explicit references to other
social and economic philosophers of his time, creating an intertextual argument that produces
a fictional place for the sake of a thought experiment. As Stephen Duncombe (More, 2012)
claims, “Utopia is not a plan, but neither is a prank. It is a prompt” (p. xlviii). Thus utopic
imaginings are neither pure fantasy nor a strict master plan, but provocative claims for future
potentialities.
Writing over 400 years later, German philosopher Ernst Bloch locates utopia as a
conceptual process that is a central driving force to the human psyche. Reinforcing utopian
strands of Marxist politics, Bloch creates a theory in which utopia shifts from a type of
dreaming to an active practice, reshaping the world around us. In Bloch’s magnum opus The
Principle of Hope (1986) originally published in 1954, he systematically analyzes the ways in
which hope, utopic yearning, and dreams lie at the core of human activity, from interior,
personal desires to grand social revolutions. As Douglas Kellner (2010) puts it, “For Bloch,
hope permeates everyday consciousness and its articulation in cultural forms, ranging from the

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fairy tale to the great philosophical and political utopias. For Bloch, individuals are unfinished,
they are animated by “dreams of a better life”, and by utopian longings for fulfillment” (p. 40).
Bloch argues that humans and society are not predefined, closed systems, but are in a
constant state of becoming, moving towards a horizon of future possibilities.
By locating the utopic in everyday consciousness, Bloch shifts the nowhere of utopia to
an everywhere. Rather than an island located outside of society, utopia is the pumping blood
that keeps the collective project of humanity moving forward. This is strikingly different (and
more useful) than previous conceptions of utopia. In Fredric Jameson’s (2005, p. 2) analysis of
past utopic writings and real-world intentional communities, he critiques such attempts for
often creating totalizing systems or isolated spaces governed by very specific rules. The issue
with totalizing spaces is that they are top-down and dominated spaces (Lefebvre, 1991) that
force particular principles from above rather than offer room for everyday citizens to fully
participate and make their own. As I have argued throughout these chapters, top-down models
of design and development are doomed to fail. Systems of society should be open to the
messiness of human activity and a diversity of citizens, including future inhabitants.
Indeed, past attempts at top-down utopia - driven by centralized powers often
characterized by narrow ideological visions - have led to horrific outcomes. As Duncombe
(More, 2012, ix) argues, “Utopia is a hard sell in the twenty-first century. Today we are people
who know better. We know the horrors of “actually existing” Utopias of the previous century:
Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Maoist China, and so on in depressing repetition.” Utopia
should not be conceived as a totalizing model but rather as an imaginative drive towards
alternative social conditions and economic systems. Duncombe overall argues to update
utopian impulses towards an “open utopia” that includes open participation in a process of
collectively striving for a better world. Historian Russell Jacoby (2005, p. xiv-xvi) makes the
distinction between the two as a form of “blueprint utopianism” versus “iconoclastic

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utopianism”. While the former “blueprint” is a governmental model that attempts to instantiate
very specific and clear ideological systems, the “iconoclastic” is a rebellious ideal that lives in
the imagination.
Within Bloch’s definition of imaginative, utopic impulses, he distinguishes between
abstract utopia vs. concrete utopia. “Abstract utopias” are those dreams that are driven by
fantasy or memory. At best, abstract utopia is playful, fantastical and completely tied to
individual whimsy. At worst, they are nostalgic and reactionary; the base impulses that can be
co-opted by fascist rhetorical and nationalism. “Concrete utopia” on the other hand is a form of
praxis, an act of striving towards a better society that influences concrete actions. As theorist
Ruth Levitas (1990, p. 15) explains:

Concrete utopia, on the other hand, is anticipatory rather than compensatory. It reaches
forward to a real possible future, and involves not merely wishful but will-full thinking:
‘There is never anything soft about conscious-known hope, but a will within it insists: it
should be so, it must become so' (1:147). Concrete utopia embodies what Bloch claims
as the essential Utopian function, that of simultaneously anticipating and effecting
the future [emphasis added].

Concrete utopia is a practical tool for translating hopes and aspirations into tactics and
strategies that actively shape the world around us. Bloch takes seriously the role of utopic
thought to drive social change and political action. Rather than try to carve out wholly new
spaces or drive utopia from top-down institutions, Bloch’s model creates a distributed form of
utopia that lives in individuals’ imaginations and is negotiated through practical attempts at
social transformation.

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B. Utopic Cultural Surplus

The very power and truth of Marxism consists in the fact that it has driven the cloud in
our dreams further forward, but has not extinguished the pillar of fire in those dreams,
rather strengthened it with concreteness.
- Ernst Bloch Principle of Hope (1986, p. 146)

As I discussed in the Chapter 1 section on filmic “excess”, Bloch’s theories are also
useful in the analysis of popular culture and art. Rather than reject mass culture outright (like
Adorno and Horkheimer), Bloch sees the possibilities to recuperate utopic visions and impulses
that are baked into cultural and artistic objects. As Kellner (2010) explains, “philosophy,
religion, art, and so on – the superstructure contains a cultural surplus and thus cannot be
reduced to mere ideology. For Bloch, the cultural surplus preserves unsatisfied desires and
human wishes for a better world and because these wishes are usually not fulfilled they contain
contents which remain relevant to a future society which may be able to satisfy these wishes
and needs” (p. 42). Bloch identifies how individuals are attracted to utopic elements within
culture that often exceed the limited ideological or narrative models of those cultural products
or superstructures. Radical political possibilities can then become strengthened by identifying
and building upon these utopic impulses that drive human dreams and hopes.
Bloch (1986, pp. 216-222) posits that cultural creations can represent future horizons of
possibilities. Bloch calls this anticipatory consciousness, or the moments in which future
possible social conditions can be articulated or glimpsed. Kellner (2010) explains, “this three-
dimensional temporality must be grasped and activated by an anticipatory consciousness that
at once perceives the unrealized emancipatory potential in the past, the latencies and
tendencies of the present, and the realizable hopes of the future” (p. 40). Anticipatory

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consciousness then are self-conscious, contemporary attempts at articulating future potentials.
Other times, they are cultural objects that retrospectively can be interpreted as containing
articulations of the future, but the conditions did not exist in their own time. Like points of light
that pierce the shadows of the unknown, anticipatory consciousness gives us a glimpse at
other possible future societies.
In Chapter 1, I analyzed how excess and cultural surplus existed within popular science
fiction films like Blade Runner (1982) and Her (2013). While the films themselves may have
problematic representations or narrative conclusions, they still give form to utopic and sublime
possibilities that exceed their narrative limitations. Here, I argue that such utopic impulses or
representations of anticipatory consciousness can become more intentional and systematized
as a way to consciously inspire viewers and citizens to other potential progressive or radical
possible worlds. This call for utopia is not merely to argue against problematic representations
alone, but to generally shift the ways in which critical science fiction arguments are made. To
put it simply, this is a call to shift from dystopian to utopian narratives.
Previously, I discussed how science fiction uses “cognitive estrangement” (as defined
by Darko Suvin, 1972) to exaggerate features of our own society in order to make its
characteristics more apparent to readers and viewers. This is often a product of dystopian
narratives that highlight the inevitable consequences of our contemporary culture. For
example, in Blade Runner the presence of massive advertisements reveals the ways in which
our own contemporary urban spaces are being invaded by consumerist images and private
interests. As Duncombe (More, 2012) argues, “Dystopia is therefore less an imagination of
what might be than a revealing of the hidden logic of what already is” (p. xviii). It is not enough
then to merely point out the ills of contemporary society. Science fiction creators should also
provide insights and models for a better society. Similar to dystopian science fiction,
speculative design argues for “defamiliarization” tactics - in the tradition of avant-garde art - to

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jolt the viewer out of their habitual ways of seeing the world. But what about the role of hope,
utopia, and collective imaginations?
While sci-fi and speculative design work to reveal the negative consequences of current
socio-technical trends extended into the future, anticipatory consciousness identifies utopic
and progressive potentials in our world. Critique is valid, but it is also already implicit in the
utopic utterance for another world beyond the limits of our own. By positing alternative
potentials, we fuel the collective hope and imagination to break through current social and
economic restrictions rather than merely pointing out those restrictions. Anticipatory
consciousness offers another lens for searching for positive potentials within our everyday
lives. Before building a better world, there needs to be a process of identifying the utopic
elements in our contemporary world as seeds for a better future.

C. Towards an Anticipatory Design

Utopia as the basis of an alternative society requires the participation of its population.
In the past people were forced to accept plans for an alternative society, but this is the
past we are trying to escape. If we reject the anti-democratic, politics-from above model
that has haunted past Utopias, can the public be persuaded to ponder such radical
alternatives themselves?
- Stephen Duncombe, Open Utopia (2012, p. xxi)

What would a creative “anticipatory” practice look like? Can we design stories, objects,
and worlds that produce aesthetic arguments for a better future rather than defamiliarize and
reveal the underlying logics of our world? I would argue for creating an “anticipatory design”
that builds upon the utopic elements of today in order to model another society that is more

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pluralistic, egalitarian, and ecologically sustainable. Building upon the theories of Bloch,
anticipatory design would harness the imaginative potential and hopeful drives of individuals to
create aesthetic forms and holistic story worlds that point forward to new potentialities. This
would entail a shift in consciousness away from dystopian defamiliarization to utopian
provocations. As I will discuss in the next section, activists are already using science fiction,
popular culture, and Afrofuturism in workshops and protests to create powerful stories and
metaphors about social change. Here, I will briefly explore the tangled history of the term
“anticipatory design” before laying out the larger methodology and inspirations that fuel my
collaborative Sankofa City project.
The term “anticipatory design” is not new. Buckminster Fuller actually devised a
concept called “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science” in the 1950s as a methodology
for developing future-forward designs. Like World Building (discussed in Chapter 1), Fuller’s
method was an attempt to create holistic designs that tackled large scale systemic issues
related to ecology and energy. Kappraff (2001) explains, “Fuller defined ‘Comprehensive
Anticipatory Design Science’, his preferred term, as problem-solving ‘to isolate specific
instances of the pattern of a general, cosmic energy system and turn these to human use” (p.
xi). Fuller’s definition was an attempt to find fractal elements that exist across natural and
social systems in order to create designs that rippled out and changed the world. Grandiose as
it may be, Fuller was attempting to infuse design with more scientific systems thinking to tackle
and change ongoing social issues. As his concept of “Spaceship Earth” (Fuller, 2008) points to,
Fuller argued to think of Earth as one total system in which all humanity is responsible for
managing.
Recently, anticipatory design was redefined by Huge CEO Aaron Shapiro (Fast Co
Design, 2015) to represent a model in which ubiquitous computing systems could anticipate a
user’s needs in advance and provide them with goods and services. For example, your

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refrigerator would order more milk for you or a taxi/ride share would be called for you once you
finished a meeting. The argument goes that in an economy of limited attention and an
overabundance of choices, consumers are experiencing “decision fatigue”. Rather than
become cognitively overwhelmed by consumer choices and everyday decisions, Shapiro’s idea
of anticipatory design promises a customized technological system that eliminates choices all
together. The experience would be defined by users creating a profile and then an AI further
developing that profile based on consumer choices and habits.
My definition of “anticipatory design” then takes inspiration from and attempts to
recuperate Fuller’s underlying goals and utopic impulses. Shapiro’s definition is a perverse
consumerist twist on Fuller’s initial radical proposal. Rather than attempting to tackle massive
“wicked problems” related to sustainability and overpopulation, Shapiro’s concept merely
attempts to smooth hyper-consumerism into a more enjoyable user experience. The initial
benefactors of an “anticipatory design” ubiquitous computing - or ubiquitous consuming -
system would most likely be those with extreme wealth. And while limited cognitive attention is
a real issue, it pales in comparison to more pressing issues related to social injustice, income
inequality, and ecological sustainability.
Anticipatory design then should be tied to Fuller’s original definition and Bloch’s notion
of anticipatory consciousness, empowering our ability to make large scale, systematic changes
in the world for the better of humanity as a whole. My definition differs from Fuller however, in
moving away from single solutions to a diversity of strategies and collaborative
experimentation. As I have argued throughout this dissertation, the complicated nature of
sociocultural existence makes single solutions nearly impossible. Or to put it another way,
systematic and scientific solutions must be negotiated and explored through a range of smaller
scale collaborations with a diverse range of populations. Especially when thinking on a global
scale, we must be highly critical of any totalizing model. Fuller is right in identifying the earth as

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one ecological system, but it is full of many interdependent components whose unique
complexity cannot be taken lightly.
Therefore anticipatory design is a future-facing design strategy that explores the
contours of preferable futures through social collaboration and experimentation. Drawing from
world-building and speculative design, my method uses “what if” questions to provoke the
cascading implications of new technologies and social conditions across disciplines and social
milieus. This process pivots away from the speculative design arguments for defamiliarization
and micro-utopias, which either point to the ills of today or create overly idiosyncratic futures
(imagined by single designers). Rather, anticipatory design seeks large scale and
interdisciplinary collaboration to actively create objects, stories, and media that give form to
utopic impulses. By giving form to shared dreams, others can experience, test, and build upon
anticipatory designs using an additive and long-term strategy for building a better future.

II. Science Fiction Utopias and Imaginative Activism

Art is a laboratory and also a feast of implemented possibilities, together with the
thoroughly experienced alternatives therein, whereby the implementation and the result
occur in the manner of founded appearance, namely of worldly perfected pre-
appearance. In great art, exaggeration and fantasizing are most visibly applied to
tendential consistency and concrete utopia.
- Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (1986, p. 216)

Science fiction has long intersected with utopian thinking and literature. As part of
imagining future possible worlds and societies, it has often detailed possible utopian futures.

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However, early definitions of utopia often were structured around highly rational, efficient, and
technological societies. Thought of as closed, top-down systems of governance, these utopias
were often defined at the expense of everyday citizens and social issues tied to hierarchies of
race, class, and gender. As the genre evolved and the writers became more diverse, science
fiction began to take on more critical perspectives tied to social issues. In the following
subsections, I will define how utopia was initially constructed in science fiction and how it has
evolved through the intersectional and Afrofuturist lens of authors such as Octavia Butler and
Samuel Delany. These authors have been groundbreaking in their representation of futures that
tackle issues of race, gender, as well as environmentalism. Then, I will analyze the ways in
which science fiction and imaginative storyworlds have inspired direct actions and organizing
in the real world.
Recently, activists and organizers have been utilizing science fiction and popular culture
as tools for pushing the imagination and for recuperating the utopian surplus of mass media. At
USC, Henry Jenkins’s research project Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics (MAPP) has
been studying a range of youth organizations and activists that utilize pop cultural imagery and
stories as powerful collective metaphors to mobilize large scale actions. Inspired by these
young activists, Jenkins’s team of postdoctoral and doctoral students (including myself from
2013-2014) run world building workshops with diverse youth organizations to imagine future
possibilities around social justice. While in Detroit, activist adrienne maree brown uses the
writings of science fiction author Octavia Butler to run “emergent strategies” workshops
around community building, social justice, and ecological sustainability. In 2015, brown and
Walidah Imarisha organized and edited the book Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from
Social Justice Movements, which contained short stories and essays about how “visionary
fiction” could inspire and complement ongoing activist efforts. While the MAPP project focuses
on activist reappropriations of more well-known mass media storyworlds, both projects parallel

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efforts point to the ways that utopic thinking and the imagining can fuel very real world
interventions and social movements. In this section, I will unpack some of the examples tied to
both Jenkins’s concept of the “civic imagination” and brown’s concept of “emergent
strategies”.

A. Science Fiction Futures with a History of Techno-Utopia

My point is to show that the narrative of the digital divide is underwritten by a market
conception of technological utopianism that locates identity primarily in a market model
of consumer sovereignty and choice and technology as beyond history, politics, and
interests.
- Herman Gray, Cultural Moves (2005, p. 154)

While science fiction has proven to be a powerful genre for exploring social justice
movements and utopic aspirations, its origins are fraught with problematic social
representations. Indeed, the relationship between technology and utopianism is particularly
complicated and problematic. Early forms of utopian science fiction were often arguing for
rationalist and mechanistic social models, at the expense of independence or gender equality.
As Howard P. Segal found in Technological Utopianism in American Culture (1985), these
models were often predicated on the maximum efficiency of a society at the expense of
individual freedom. As he (1985) states, “this cult of efficiency is reflected in every utopian
activity and value judgement. To take the most stirring example, the virtue of cooperation is
often preferred to individualism on the basis of its efficiency, and not its moral superiority” (p.
28). Individual desires are forfeited for the sake of efficiency. Moreover, this loss is perpetuated
by a sense of uniformity and piety. Segal (1985) again claims, “Utopian man’s control over

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himself mirrors the control that technology achieves over the environment” (p. 31). People
begin to model themselves upon the machines that drive society, giving up any morally
questionable activity and any unkempt appearances. Lastly, this also meant that for the sake of
efficiency, patriarchal family relations became uniform. Segal (1985) explains, “the father rules
every household, and the mother and child submit. Only citizens judged healthy in body, mind,
and morals can marry and bear children; the small minority of the unfit are not to be allowed to
perpetuate undesirables” (p. 31). Play becomes work, whimsy is forfeited for efficiency, and the
family becomes a patriarchy that perpetuates an almost fascist reproductive exclusivity.
Jameson (2005, p. 53) claims that gender issues in general are a sort of blind-spot or
“anti-matter” within the Utopian literary genres and imaginations. He argues that because
Utopia is often so tied up within large-scale systematic thinking of society, they come up short
in reconfiguring and reimagining the most basic social unit: the family. Jameson sees this as a
failure of the imagination of (often male) authors to move beyond the normative social
formations and taboos of their time. As he (2005) puts it, “on the social level, this means that
our imaginations are hostages to our own mode of production... the best Utopias are those
that fail the most comprehensively” (p. xiii). So in imagining utopic technological systems and
societies that help alleviate capitalist exploitation and individualism, the social elements of
gender (and race) become ignored.
This neglected social element becomes important then in thinking about the role of the
individual in historical representations of the future, both in terms of gender issues and the
general social relations and the freedom of the individual actor. As we see in Segel’s analysis
of early techno-utopic thinking, the individual becomes sacrificed under the weight of hyper-
efficient machines. There is a role for meritocracy and a place for an engineer-designer king,
but in general the individual has no agency except to perform the dominant systems.
Ultimately, such narratives argue for a techno-determinist history in which the systems play

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themselves out. This is a complex issue that speaks to a larger representation question about
preferencing a system versus individuals as we make sense of the historical world. In the
following subsections, I will explore Sam Delany’s Trouble on Triton (1976) and Octavia Butler’s
Parable of the Sower (1993). In Delany’s novel, he explores the possibility of a pleasure-driven
pluralistic utopian society in which there is little governance and citizens are free to seek out
desires, pleasures, and identity transformations across all sexual and racial spectrums. While in
Butler’s novel, the individual is forced to take on great responsibility and community building
while living through the collapse of society in a drought-ridden future California.

B. Sam Delany and Critical Sci-Fi Utopias / Heterotopias

Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of
the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains
blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity.
- Jose Esteban Muñoz Cruising Utopia (2009, p. 1)

What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed
constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective—and
ironically, socialist-feminist?
- Donna Haraway Cyborg Manifesto (1991, p. 157)

In contrast to early techno- and science fiction utopias that represented overtly top-
down structures of mechanistic efficiency that lacked attention to gender, strands of 1960-70s
science fiction explicitly explored utopias of sexual desire and gender fluidity. Sam Delany’s
Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) takes place on the moon colony of Triton,

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where there are 40-50 different possible intersectional (based on class, gender, sex, etc.)
identities and any sexual kink can be satisfied. As Edward Chan (2001) argues, the book
explores utopia (or Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia”) from a, “micro- logical" perspective of
everyday life, rather than the traditional utopian, macrological perspective of social totality” (p.
180). In contrast to earlier top-down utopias, Triton has little to no governmental structure and
there are even sections of the city that are not governed by law at all. Neil Easterbrook (1997)
points out that the book is in dialogue with other critical utopian sci-fi such as Robert A.
Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) and Ursula K. Le Guin's Dispossessed: An
Ambiguous Utopia (1974), which explore anarchist societies founded on colonized moons. This
dialogue reinforces Jameson’s argument that utopian literature is inherently intertextual, as
authors continue to evolve a more nuanced understanding of utopia.
In Trouble on Triton, the moon of Triton has very few laws, both prostitution and
marriage are illegal - thus abolishing any sense of property tied to sexual relationships. Rather
child-rearing is shared by multiple people, often living in communal living spaces with multiple
overlapping polyamorous relationships. In this future society, technology has also advanced
enough to allow men to carry and birth children. Indeed body modification technology allows
anyone to change either their race or gender upon their desire - denaturalizing or de-
essentializing such features and their role as social classifications.
It is this loss of essentialized gender and race-based social structures and hierarchies
that confounds the central character of the book. The story is told from the perspective of Bron
Helstram, a blonde and blue-eyed former male prostitute from Mars. Coming from a society
that perpetuates traditional patriarchal and racial hierarchies, Helstram is deeply disturbed by
the lack of fixed identities and the polyphony of sexual experiences. His desire is to be the
center of attention and worshipped by women, in order to feed his definition of what a heroic
white man should do and be. His roommate informs him that his desires are a perversion that

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rarely exists on Triton anymore. Indicative of the larger Tritonian obsession with statistics,
Bron’s roommate calculates that while there is little-to-no chance of him finding a woman that
would desire such a traditional pairing, there is a higher possibility of men that still hold such
“logical perversions” for patriarchal heteronormativity (Delany 1976, p. 212). Unable to find a
woman to adhere to his vision of masculinity, Bron has a sex reassignment operation in order
to become a female and better have a chance of finding a man that will objectify him. In an
absurdist twist, he courts Sam, a large and politically powerful black man, who was born a
blonde woman. Ultimately though, Sam and other men refuse Bron’s self-objectifying courtship
and Bron’s loneliness drives him/her insane.
The point of the central white male protagonist is to subvert the normal protagonist
identification through defamiliarization and satire to highlight the absurdity of masculinity itself.
For the average person living on Triton, otherness is the constant state of being - thus opening
the systematic and overly designed techno utopias to one that now embraces a post-modern
sense of perpetual difference and gender fluidity. While previous critics (Moylan 1980) read
Triton as a post-modern and pluralist update of the utopian impulse, Edward Chan (2001)
argues that it must be conceived as a heterotopian novel that means to shock or displace the
reader and question their epistemological assumptions. While utopia is an ideal based on
contemporary worldviews, the extensive and absurdist range of lifestyles and sexual desires in
Triton are meant to perpetually displace any single sense of interpretation or moral framework.
Wendy Gay Pearson (2009, p. 465) extends Chan’s argument, claiming:

Reading Triton as a postmodern utopia not only moves away from Foucault's
formulations of heterotopia - formulations important to a reading of the novel precisely
because Delany himself cites them - but also succumbs to an impoverished definition of
difference that, as Eve Sedgwick has pointed out, reverts to the meager along which

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Western epistemologies are able to think about.

So while Triton represents a utopia that is pluralistic and largely nonhierarchical, it still
represents an ambiguity or a critique of difference tied to western definitions of the other.
Indeed, Chan (2001, p. 182) argues that its society is hyper-liberalist and “a random
juxtaposition of the same and other”, pointing to the overly hedonistic impulse of consuming
difference for its own sake.
Chan (2001, p. 204) argues for differentiating heterotopia from utopia. He claims that
utopia relies on a “coherent self-image” while heterotopia disrupts the sense of identification,
coherency, and closure. But as I’ve argued earlier, Bloch’s definition of utopia relies upon a
sense of perpetual openness. Bloch (1986, pp. 215-216) argues that the utopic work of art for
example is one that is never finished; as closure would assume a possible final, ideal
destination rather than the constant striving for a better world. While Chan’s argument is
nuanced and provocative, it often relies too heavily on an identification with Bron, who is
obviously an anti-hero or foil to represent the stifled mid-century Western definitions of social
and sexual hierarchies. For example, part of Chan’s (2001, p. 185) analysis lies upon a critique
of Bron’s impossible ability to individuate himself from the fluid masses of bodies in the city.
The crowds appear overwhelming and threatening to individual consciousness and the sense
of the self.
However, in reading Jose Muñoz’s analysis of Delany’s memoir, it is precisely the mass
collective of queer bodies that Delany witnesses at a clandestine public orgy that gives him
utopic hope. In Delany’s 1988 memoir The Motion of Light on Water (2014), he recounts
attending an orgy by the New York City docks, hidden behind semi-trucks and the cover of
darkness. What Delany (as a queer black man) saw in the orgy - with mass bodies of men
loving and moving fluidly amongst different men - was a sense of collective care and pleasure.

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Using Bloch’s terminology, Muñoz (2009) describes this moment of inspiration as “anticipatory
consciousness” or a witnessing of utopic future possibilities in the present. As Delany recalls,
there was intimacy and connection across classes and races, forming an intersectional and
pluralistic sexual collective experience. Muñoz (2009) argues, “Delany explains that ‘the first
apprehension of massed bodies’ signals a direct sense of political power. This apprehension
debunks dominant ideology’s characterization of antinormative subject-citizens as ‘isolated
perverts’ (p. 52). Rather than feeling like an “isolated pervert” (a phrase Delany uses in his
memoir), Delany saw the collective potential of the queer community. Therefore, the dialogue in
Trouble on Triton, when Helstrom’s roommate calls his patriarchal desires “logical
perversions”, represents a reversal of the same ostracizing claims that were used against
Delany’s own sexuality in the U.S. in the 1970-80s.
So while Chan argues against the terms of “critical utopia” to classify the book as a
heterotopia, there are no doubt deep strands of utopian possibilities within the text. Outside of
possible narratological differentiation, what is the benefit of separating heterotopia from
Moylan’s (1986) definition of critical utopia? Mark A. Tabone (2013) sums up Moylan’s
definition of critical utopia: “it resists conventional tendencies toward social, ideological, and
textual closure through this self-problematization, as well as through the way “the apparently
unified, illusory, and representational text of the more traditional utopia is broken open” (p.
242). Similar to Bloch’s definition of utopic art, critical utopia is one that is meant to be open
and unfinished, with multiple possible vantage points of interpretation and dialogue with future
generations. If Delany’s novel is a response to Ursula K. Le Guin's Dispossessed: An
Ambiguous Utopia (1974), then it would be assumed to have successive authors take up the
conversation either in critique or addition. The utopic form is an ongoing and never finished
intertextual and collective process. The heterotopic nature of epistemological disruption should
be part of the utopic representation as it opens up, questions, or de-centers assumptions of

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the reader and audience. Utopian work should not only reaffirm our dreams but also question
them to ultimately produce new ones.

C. Afrofuturism and Activism: Octavia Butler and Emergent Strategies

[I]t is a mistake to approach Utopias with positive expectations, as though they offered
visions of happy worlds, spaces of fulfillment and cooperation, representations which
correspond generically to the idyll or the pastoral...rather than the diagnostic
interventions of the Utopias, which, like those of great revolutionaries, always aim at the
alleviation and elimination of the sources of exploitation and suffering, rather than at the
composition of blueprints for bourgeois comfort.
- Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (2011, p. 12)

Just as science fiction authors work in dialogue to inspire each other, recent activists
have begun to utilize sci-fi provocations, utopias, and imaginative processes for social
organizing and actions in the real world. For example, Ursula Le Guin has inspired a number of
activists (brown, 2017b; Haran, 2017; Smillie, 2017) to incorporate her story concepts into their
work, or to inspire new strategies for incorporating imaginative and utopic processes. Tuesday
Smillie (2017) refers to Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (1969) as an example of the “radical
imagination”, while activist Joan Haran (2017) utilizes Dispossessed (1974) to inspire
“imaginactivism”. Drawing from Bloch and Donna Haraway, Joan Haran defines
“imaginactivism” as a necessary tool for actively imagining better worlds to strive towards. She
explains (2017), “utopia is something you do, not simply a static vision of an ideal state, and
imaginactivism is a coinage intended to do similar work...Both imaginactivism and this
characterization of utopia are akin to Haraway’s use of ‘worlding’ which refers to the entangled

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processes of imagining/making worlds and being imagined/made up by worlds” (p. 3). Here we
see the ways in which utopian theory and science fiction storytelling intersect with real-world
efforts by activists to change the world around them. Indeed, it points to the ways in which
critical utopias and storytelling are active participants in reshaping the world by feeding new
social models and provocations to the larger population. This becomes part of the larger
process of creating infrastructures of the imagination, in which stories, aesthetic objects, and
imaginative visions inspire real world action and organizing, that in turn create new possibilities
for social conditions - in a feedback loop.
For the sake of the Sankofa City project, I am most interested in the work of activist
adrienne maree brown, who has developed “emergent strategies” and workshop series based
on Octavia Butler. Growing up as a biracial queer woman with parents from the South,
adrienne maree brown always strived for and imagined a better world beyond the racialized
hierarchies of the US. In Octavia Butler, she found a model for building better worlds that
focused on interpersonal relationships, self-care, and community building. Now as an activist
working in Detroit, Butler’s books - particularly Parable of the Sower (1993) - have acted as
models for brown to think through community organizing in the face of a de-industrializing city.
brown, among other activist, have been working tirelessly to create a network of community-
run gardens to provide local food sources as well as employment opportunities for the recently
incarcerated, often black men in their 30s-50s (Movement Generation, 2009, p. 16).
For brown, her activist work is always concerned with scale. Working on community
gardening not only focuses on high unemployment and poverty rates due to Detroit’s
deindustrialization, but also tackles larger ecological issues related to climate change and soil
toxification from industrial pollution. As brown (2017a) explains, “The crisis is everywhere,
massive massive massive. And we are small. But emergence notices the way small actions and
connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies...

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Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody
the just and liberated worlds we long for” (p. 7). What brown is interested in is how small
individual actions lead to collective organizing and community building that then ripple out to
large scale changes. Particularly in the face of massive issues and bleak circumstances, how
can individuals empower themselves and others to face such obstacles? She focuses on
Parable of the Sower precisely because it engages in these questions. Parable is a dystopian
novel, but the central character provides a utopian model for surviving and developing in such
extreme situations. The novel is ultimately a pragmatic dystopian that showcases survival
strategies.
Parable of the Sower takes place in 2024 in the greater Los Angeles area. California has
been in an extensive drought that has devastated the economy and the capacities for food
production. With a decrease in public/state funding (outside of the police) and an increase in
debtor slave labor, the social fabric of the state and the nation have fallen apart. The streets
are filled with roaming gangs and drug-addicted pyromaniacs. Walled-off communities are no
longer merely a luxury of the extremely wealthy, but have become a necessity for survival.
Militarized borders no longer just separate the U.S. from Mexico but divide U.S. states from
each other. This is a neoliberal created nightmare.
Published in 1993, in the wake of the LA Uprising, crack epidemics, and Reaganomics,
Parable of the Sower is a forewarning to America to change its ways. Out of this urban context,
Parable of the Sower appears to be not just a fanciful imagining, but also a very real
inevitability. But how then does humanity survive? Butler’s book centers on interracial and
intergenerational community building as a redeeming force to fight against the dark, murderous
nature of private competition run wild. The central character Laura Olamina is the daughter of a
priest who learns from her father the importance of education and community dialogue, as well
as the importance of survival tactics such a using firearms and community farming. He’s a

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community leader that has to maintain relationships amongst an eclectic group that is multi-
ethnic, multi-generational, and composed of ranges of household formations, from the
traditional nuclear family to polygamous households. Despite their differences, the community
maintains a semblance of humanity and a strong social contract in the face of ever-
encroaching thieves and drug addicts bent on burning everything down.
It is only inevitable that their complex finally succumbs to the dark, violent nature of the
city. The community is invaded and the majority of residents are killed. Laura meets up with
two survivors: Zahra, a young black woman who was initially bought out of prostitution, and
Harry, a young naïve white man who still holds onto societal norms of the past. They make
their way north by walking on freeways. The massive transportation structures are now full of
roaming migrants, without a car in sight. The journey gives us a glimpse into the state of
California. The smaller towns are more sustainable and safer than the urban jungle, but they
also want to maintain their isolationism from others, who are also racially diverse.
As they make their journey up towards Washington State, they pick up new community
members, often those with children or women with no support. Laura is guided by and shares
with her nomad community her concept of “Earth Seed”, her own personal religion based on a
holistic natural understanding of sustainability as well as a belief in self-empowerment. For her,
god is change; there is no deity but rather the need to adapt, change, and survive in order to
evolve through the dystopia they’ve been thrown into. As brown (2017a) claims, “Octavia was
concerned with scale—understanding that what happens at the interpersonal level is a way to
understand the whole of society. In many of her books, she shows us how radical ideas spread
through conversation, questions, one to one interactions” (p. 17). In her book, brown points out
that “strategy” - the military term - often focuses on a singular long-term plan based upon a
centralized leadership. Butler rather represents the ways in which “emergent strategies”
develop informally through dialogue and social relationship.

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In general, brown is interested in science fiction and storytelling because it engages the
larger collective imagination. She (2017a) argues that, “We are in an imagination battle.
Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead
because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous...I often feel I am trapped inside
someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free” (p.
15). These young black men and women were killed by both police and everyday citizens
because of an internalized imagination - based on a long history of popular representation - of
African-Americans’ bodies as dangerous threats. This battle of the imagination is part of a
larger artistic movement, known as Afrofuturism (Womack, 2013; Bould, 2007; Yaszeck, 2006;
Dery, 1994), which highlights the artistic work of African, Afro-Latino, and African-American
who are engaging with new technologies or imagining futures that celebrate their cultural
identity and heritage.
One of the central tenants of Afrofuturism is to not only create a space for black writers
in Science-Fiction but also to create alternative histories and systems for thinking about how
the future will develop. As artist D. Denenge Akpem (quoted in Womack, 2013) says, "there's
this idea that if you can control time and your place in it, you can control the course of history
and your own history. Afrofuturists create new visions. If you can create a new vision of the
future, you can create a new vision of the past” (p. 154). Afrofuturism is concerned with
deconstructing and decolonizing dominant historical narratives to reveal the position of African
and African-American cultures within that process. Moreover, it is deeply invested in staking
out space in the future development of the human race that is sensitive to and representative
of more Afrocentric social dynamics and cosmologies.
In Parable of the Sower, the central protagonist’s name Olamina comes from the
African Yoruba people. In researching the book, Butler was particularly drawn to the Yoruba
tribe because of their holistic scientific relationship to nature. The “Earth Seed” then was an

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Afrofuturist, sustainable system that would hopefully blossom out of the ashes of a failed
western industrial-scientific system that developed alongside the history of empire and capital.
Thus Butler does not just present a warning, but also an alternative system for battling the
woes of neoliberalism and global capital.
In the story, Olamina and her nomad group do not make it all the way to Washington
but eventually establish an enclave in the woods of Northern California. But with the
establishment of the enclave, away from the dangerous city or highways, the group is able to
plant the seed of a new society and start from scratch. Here the individual lives and decisions
become a way out and a way forward from the historically rooted mess that has become of this
fictional US society. Jameson (2011, p. 7) defines this as a strong characteristic of utopic
impulses and literature:

Discussions of temporality always bifurcate into the two paths of existential experience
(in which questions of memory seem to predominate) and of historical time, with its
urgent interrogation of the future. I will argue that it is precisely in Utopia that these two
dimensions are seamlessly reunited and that existential time is taken up into a historical
time, which is paradoxically also the end of time, the end of history.

The personal stakes for Olamina are massive, as the individual praxis becomes the sites
for alternative possibilities for change. When the infrastructures of dominant society collapse,
the only option out is through personal alternatives. Though Butler’s story is an imaginative
fictional tale, it is nonetheless deeply rooted in the material past of Southern California
development and deeply invested in creating practical solutions for constructing alternatives in
the present. In thinking about the future, Olamina actually wanted to eventually bring her
community to another life-bearing planet. Her enclave would be the beginning of a new

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alternative practice, but it had to exist in isolation from the rest of society. Global society itself
seemed so far gone and the Earth so environmentally devastated, that the only truly
sustainable alternative would have to take root elsewhere.
Inspired by the story, brown has been running community workshops to work with
everyday citizens and activists to imagine a better world - and strategies for how to get there.
She is deeply invested in the power of imaginative and science fiction storytelling to provide
hope for others and give them a future-oriented perspective on their work. As brown (2017a)
describes it, “I would call our work to change the world ‘science fictional behavior’— being
concerned with the way our actions and beliefs now, today, will shape the future, tomorrow,
the next generations.” In a sense, she is using different terminology to describe the state of
mind that Bloch referred to with “anticipatory consciousness” (p. 14). Like the other activists,
theorists, and artists in these sections, brown represents a practice that engages with utopic
thinking in order to collectively create new models of the world that are now only correctives of
contemporary ills but radical departures from western and capitalist cultural domination. In
these works, we truly see utopia not as a clearly defined and closed system but as a lifelong
praxis.

D. Civic Imagination and World Building

Imagination-driven activism does not have to merely derive from radical, utopic, or
critical science fiction. Superman can be an inspirational figure for undocumented immigrants.
The Mockingjay salute from The Hunger Games (2012-2015) can become a powerful gesture of
social resistance. These are examples of what Henry Jenkins and his research team call the
“civic imagination”. In their article “Superpowers to the People!”, they define the civic
imagination as, “the ways that young activists...are conducting politics through images and

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narratives from popular culture, encouraging other youth to ‘imagine better’, to envision
alternatives to current conditions and develop new pathways into political and civic
engagement” (Jenkins, Shresthova, Gamber-Thompson, & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2016, pp. 295 -
296). Similar to Duncombe’s (2007) argument for using “ethical spectacles” (discussed in
Chapter 2) to inspire political action and social movements, Jenkins’ team identifies groups
that use spectacles and storytelling to tap into collective desires and dreams for a better world.
What is particularly striking about these groups however is the ways in which they build their
movements atop popular culture and the deep emotional imprints that such stories have on the
population. Precisely as Bloch theorized, these activist groups are recuperating the cultural
surplus of mass media products in order to transform their latent utopic potential into action.
Superman for example was used by activist and blogger Erick Huerta to mobilize
around the rights of DREAMers. The name DREAMers references the Development, Relief, and
Education of Alien Minors (DREAM) act, which was first introduced by Senators Dick Durbin (D-
IL) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented youth that
were brought to the US at a very early age. The act had gone through multiple provisions over
10 years in order to create criteria around who was eligible - such as those without criminal
records, who worked a job, and/or were accepted to universities. Yet to this day, the bill still
has not been passed. The Superman story resonated with DREAMers because he was brought
to Earth as an infant and lived among earthlings all his life, yet he had to hide his true identity
and origin. As Matt Yockey (2012, cited in Jenkins et al. 2016) states, “while the visual and
narrative excess of the genre speak directly to the affective capacity of childhood play, the
superhero also speaks specifically to the transcendent agency of imagining a new social self”
(p. 300). The DREAMers used Superman as a metaphorical figure to represent their own
“superpowers” and how they had to grow up and work in America - yet also “live in the
shadows.” So activists like Huerta used the metaphor as a way to empower these individuals

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to mobilize, protest, or share their stories online with others.
The use of super heroes is interesting because they are such well known facets in
contemporary global society, like modern myths, that millions of people are familiar with. Thus
the superhero genre has the potential to not only provide inspiration for young activists but
also cultural bridges for everyday citizens who are less familiar with the activists’ struggle. In
2013, after the release of Man of Steel, a campaign was launched called “Superman is an
Immigrant” by the groups Define American and Imagine Better in order to raise awareness and
garner sympathy for undocumented youth in the US. Imagine Better is an offshoot of a larger
group called the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), which was started by Harry Potter fans / youth
activists to use the popular children’s series as a tool to garner support around social justice
issues. At the time of publication of the Jenkins et al. (2016) article, the HPA group had over
100,000 members across the United States. Building on the power and the popularity of such
massive franchises offered a strategy for large-scale outreach and organizing.
Inspired by such examples, Jenkins’ MAPP research team - particularly Sangita
Shresthova and Gabriel Peters-Lazaro - have been running world building workshops with
youth to harness their imagination and come up with stories for a better future. As I discussed
in chapter 1, the world building design method begins with provocative “what if” questions and
then designs around the implications of those questions. The implications are often explored
by identifying relevant domains (such as transportation, fashion, architecture, ecology, etc.)
and fleshing out the contours of such changes in those domains. For example, I participated in
a MAPP workshop with Latino youth in Los Angeles, in which the group brainstormed around
the question “what if there were no borders?” This question then lead to youth participants
reimagining what citizenship and the nation-state would look like, profoundly reimagining the
future of taxes, social relations to place, and global economics.
The group has since run similar workshops with a diverse range of participants, from a

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Muslim youth group in Los Angeles to economically struggling groups in Appalachian country
in Kentucky. Since the initial “borderless future” workshop, the method has changed to
brainstorm the initial “what if” question itself with the participants. This creates a more iterative
process upfront, in which a few domains are identified (such as food systems, transportation,
etc.) and then participants themselves come up with provocative questions or identifying
disruptive trends in those domains. From there, participants choose the most salient
provocations and design around those questions. In this sense, the process also works as a
data-collecting tool as well to better understand what issues resonate most with the
participants. In the Muslim youth workshop (which I participated in), issues of representations
and Muslim stereotypes became a central topic of debate. While in the workshop held in the
industrial region of Kentucky, the disruptive potential of autonomous trucking and the desire
for affordable health care became key issues to design around.
While the “civic imagination” was initially conceptualized in terms of activist
appropriations of popular culture, the subsequent workshops highlight the potential of fiction
more broadly as a tool for imagining better futures. Rather than being bogged down by the
“tyranny of the possible” (Duncombe, 2012, p. xlii), world building and the civic imagination
offer methods for imaginative and anticipatory creations that derive from the desires and
dreams of everyday citizens. In my own final dissertation project, which I will elaborate upon in
the subsequent section, I utilize a similar world building methodology within residents from the
African-American community of Leimert Park in Los Angeles. In my methodology however, I
more directly draw from speculative design and participatory design. Moreover, in the
workshop process and final design fiction film, my collaborator Ben Caldwell and I drew
inspiration from Afrofuturism (Womack, 2013; Grey, 2005; Dery, 1994). In the process we
developed a nascent form of anticipatory design, which is utopic while addressing the
complicated and agonistic democratic process of participatory design.

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III. Sankofa City - Community-Based Anticipatory Design

At the human scale, in order to create a world that works for more people, for more life,
we have to collaborate on the process of dreaming and visioning and implementing that
world. We have to recognize that a multitude of realities have, do, and will exist.
Collaborative Ideation is a way to get into this—ideation is the process of birthing new
ideas, and the practice of collaborative ideation is about sharing that process as early as
possible
- adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategies (2017, p. 99)
A. Hybrid Methods for Urban Futures
Engaging communities in a process of speculative design and design fiction can
empower citizens to develop future-facing technologies tied to their local culture. Engaging
with ongoing issues of urban development and potential cultural displacement, the Sankofa
City project developed a nascent “anticipatory design” method to co-design holistic urban
models and design fictions that articulate community participants’ desires and visions for the
future. By drawing from participatory design’s emphasis on “agonistic democracy” (DiSalvo,
2014; Bjorgvinsson et al., 2012; Mouffe, 2000), we can collectively explore the imaginative and
contentious possibilities of future socio-technical urban systems.
Ongoing U.S. population shifts toward urban city centers have created an exciting and
delicate time for innovation and urban interactive design (UIxD). Introducing new technological
infrastructure to vulnerable urban populations can deepen disparities and undermine local
culture for the sake of new development. With autonomous urban systems like self-driving cars
and ubiquitous computing, communities may struggle to re-insert their sense of agency and

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ownership once human control has been removed. Even personal technologies, like
augmented and mixed reality, have the potential to isolate users from their immediate cultural
environment.
The issues of urban development, technological infrastructures and interfaces, and
cultural displacement present a multidimensional wicked problem (Gaver, 2012; Coyne, 2005;
Buchanan, 1992) that cannot be solved by a single design or engineering solution. Urban
planning is full of unexpected variables tied to socio-cultural dimensions. Such design
solutions must engage with their community of end users. As discussed in Chapter 2, past
attempts by urban master planners often exacerbate housing and livability issues, precisely
because they ignored the complexity of local culture for their own idealized vision (McCullough,
2005; Soja, 1989; Jacobs, 1961). Contemporary theories and methods like “everyday
urbanism” (Chase, Crawford, & Kaliski, 1999) and “tactical urbanism” (Lydon & Garcia, 2015)
point to ways to work with local communities to incrementally change the city from the bottom-
up. Everyday urbanism is particularly invested in deep cultural engagement, that is non-
judgmental and scaffolds urban planning upon the pre-existing forms, aesthetic
communication, and cultural activities.
Recently, digital civic tools and methods have been created to use technological
infrastructures to enhance community participation (Asad, Le Dantec, Nielsen, & Diedrick,
2017; Balestrini et al., 2017; Richardson, Crivellaro, Kharrufa, Montague, & Olivier, 2017), but
have not solved socio-economic disparities (Erete & Burrell, 2017). The “digital divide” (Selwyn,
2004; Norris, 2001) and the “participation gap” (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, &
Robison, 2009) continue to appear as technological adoption is unevenly distributed - often
along class and racial divisions. Increasingly, cities have developed better digital tools for
everyday citizens to communicate issues to municipal services, which usually manifests as
phone apps to report minor city issues (e.g., potholes). As DiSalvo, Jenkins, and Lodato (2016)

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argue, contemporary civic leaders often struggle to move “smart cities” beyond immediate
issues and only imagine short-term future horizons. Rather than revolutionizing the experience
of the city, such efforts act as digital bandaids or more efficient versions of pre-existing
services. The issue then is a lack of foresight and long-term speculation about how urban
centers will fundamentally change in the next 30 to 50 (to 70) years. DiSalvo et al. argue for a
speculative civics to investigate the real paradigmatic shifts that exist on the horizon of our
time.
As discussed in Chapter 1, speculative and critical design (Elsden et al., 2017; DiSalvo,
Jenkins, & Lodato 2016; Dunne & Raby, 2013) and design fiction (Coulton, Lindley, Sturdee, &
Stead, 2017; Lindley & Coulton, 2015; Linehan et al., 2014; Blythe, 2014; Bleecker, 2009)
create Human computer interaction (HCI) artefacts and scenarios that represent alternative,
critical, or yet-to-exist design objects and interfaces. Drawing from conceptual art and science
fiction, the practices have a strong emphasis on aesthetics, storytelling, and conceptual
provocation. The strength of these contemporary practices is the focus on social
consequences and dimensions, something with powerful potential when applied to urban life.
DiSalvo, Jenkins, and Lodato (2016) argue, “While some design theorists argue that design is
almost always speculative, in that it is almost always about the future, this is not the case with
civics, particularly with regards to design and technology” (p. 4980). So DiSalvo et al. point to
the ways in which future-facing product design fails to address the more complicated realms of
civic society and public life. Speculative design then could be a useful method for reimagining
the city.
However, speculative and critical design have been critiqued as privileged spaces that
are either elitist (Forlano & Mathew, 2014; Bowen, 2010) or ignore issues of class, race, and
gender (Martins, 2014). Exhibited in gallery settings, these projects often represent individual
designers’ imaginations with defamiliarizing objects or idiosyncratic “micro-utopias” (Dunne &

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Raby, 2013). Speculative design is a powerful aesthetic tool for representing alternative futures,
but should include diverse contributions so as not to reinforce pre-existing cultural disparities.
As Duncombe argued, speculations should work as “open utopias” (More, 2012) that include
radically democratic processes of participation in order to build collective futures based on a
diversity of desires. “Anticipatory designs” would explore contours of the future through
collaboration. In contrast to speculative design, anticipatory design positions designers as
facilitators and translators, rather than an ultimate authority. Anticipatory design works with an
interdisciplinary team and engages large scale problems through a process inspired by
participatory design (DiSalvo, Lukens, Lodato, Jenkins, & Kim, 2014; Karasti, 2014; Dantec &
DiSalvo, 2013; Björgvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren, 2010), which seeks to democratize the design
project and work with those who have deep experiential knowledge. By collaborating directly,
designers gain a better understanding of end users’ desires – and more importantly –
incorporate alternative cultural practices and social beliefs into their designs. The participants
strengthen design projects through their local cultural knowledge and personal investments in
the outcomes and consequences of proposed designs.

B. Anticipatory Design and Infrastructures of the Imagination

How can community-based speculative design help to retain cultural values and social
practices while planning for future urban computing systems and interfaces? Anticipatory
design seeks to empower local populations to engage with emerging urban-based
technologies (such as self-driving cars and augmented reality) in their own cultural terms and
design potential implementations. As I have attempted to map throughout this dissertation,
there is a productive feedback loop between speculative, imaginative, and utopic
thinking/storytelling with real world community organizing and technological/urban design.

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Infrastructures of the imagination refers to both how we build our world based on our
imaginations of the future as well as how we create infrastructures for people to participate in
that act of imagining. Anticipatory design is a methodology for consciously combining these
interrelated strands to take seriously critical utopic world building alongside community
participation and planning. Like brown’s “emergent strategies”, anticipatory design seeks to
grapple with large scale wicked problems by empowering individual citizens to participate and
transform their surroundings. Like speculative design and world building, anticipatory design
also addresses the power of presenting provocative aesthetic objects to engage with and
inspire others outside the production process.
Over the last few years, Laura Forlano (2011; 2014; 2015) and colleagues have run
workshops to create similar participatory speculative design with stakeholders across many
cities. Forlano and Mathew (2014, p. 8) argue for the need of exploring the human dimensions
of future cities:

What discussions of Smart Cities fail to account for is a holistic understanding of a full
diversity of citizens that places value on their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. This
speculative, future-oriented component removes the urgency of designing cities for
today’s problems with the notion of alternative possible futures based on more social,
psychological, and emotional aspects that tend to be missing from discussions of urban
technology.

Forlano’s workshop often take place over the course of one day with a range of stakeholders:
scientific experts, policy makers, activists, and everyday citizens. She too looks for
disagreement as much as consensus, calling these tensions “design frictions” (Forlano and
Mathew 2014). Like world building, Laura Forlano's and Anijo Mathew’s participatory

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speculative design processes use “what if” questions in order to provoke and create structures
for brainstorming. The benefit of her process is to gain quick and unique insights across
multiple communities. In many ways, the MAPP community world building process is very
similar, as it works in quick sprints with a range of local citizens, youth, and domain experts. In
general, world building as a methodology seeks to work with an interdisciplinary team through
lateral anthropology (Cechanowicz, Cantrell, & McDowell, 2016) - in order to better inform the
multiple domains (ecology, transportation, etc.) of any storyworld. World building is a very
agnostic method, being used for blockbuster storytelling (Minority Report [2002], Man of Steel
[2013]), unique commercial technology experiences (Intel, Nike), and real-world ecological
issues (water access in drought-ridden regions). With MAPP’s community world building, the
domain experts represent the experiences of everyday citizens in that community. Inspired by
these methods, along with tactical and everyday urbanism, anticipatory design can be defined
by four dimensions:

(a) Long-term relations: Our method works in very similar workshop-based speculative
brainstorming, but continues over a longer collaborative horizon, building on the participatory
design concept of infrastructuring (Karasti, 2014; Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013; Björgvinsson et al.,
2012; Karasti & Syrjänen, 2004) to create long-term systems for wider community participation
and future projects. Part of this infrastructuring process is really getting to know the
community. Inspired by “everyday urbanism” and their non-judgmental design process,
anticipatory design does not judge ways of living in the city, but builds upon those social
activities. Indeed, the power of participatory design is to uncover alternative possible designs
tied to cultures outside of professional, academic, and technological fields. Our participatory
design method is structured around uncovering the Leimert Park communities’ values and
desired behavior and creating new socio-technological systems that facilitate those desires

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rather than reinforce dominant cultural logics of either redevelopment or global capitalism.
While working in parallel to other participatory speculative design and community world
building efforts, we are committed to deep, long-term engagements to better build
relationships and understand the culture of a community.

2.) Maximal participation: Moreover, anticipatory design is inherently tied to a politics of
collective striving and envisioning. Driven by a commitment to democracy similar to
Duncombe’s idea of “open utopia” (More, 2012), the process seeks as wide of a range as
possible to better represent the diverse and conflicting perspectives of a community. As the
Sankofa City project will reveal, there will usually be some tension and agonism in the process
of collective and diverse collaborations. But these tensions or design frictions (Forlano &
Mathew, 2014) should be recognized and incorporated into the process. If we erase discontent
and disagreement, then we run the risk of recreating the same hierarchies and dominant
consensus models that we are currently living under. Moreover, these outlining voices may
reveal novel concepts and designs - that are unexpected or challenge our assumptions.

3.) Utopian politics: It is easier to identify the dystopian potentials of our world, as our
media landscape is filled with ecological crisis, income inequality, racial injustice, racist and
xenophobic organizations, large-scale corporate or government invasions of privacy, and the
like. But dystopia reveals the problems of our time without much emphasis on solutions. A
vague sense of fatalism determines many dystopian narratives, removing the sense of
individual agency and leading to possible nihilism. Bloch’s (1986) concept of “anticipatory
consciousness” rather argues to find spaces, systems, and relations in the present that reveal
utopic potentials for the future. In turn, anticipatory design seeks to engage with what the
everyday life and social consequences would be of utopian possibilities. No doubt, such

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possibilities will still be revealed to contain dystopian edges and pitfalls, but with the ultimate
goal of creating a more critical and nuanced utopic provocation, at once beautiful and
incomplete.

4.) Aesthetics to inspire publics: Science fiction has powerful impacts on our collective
imagination of the future and how socio-technological systems will develop. Much like world
building and speculative design, we take serious the need for powerful aesthetic objects and
stories that inspire affective and multisensory experiences for audience. Like Claire Bishop
(2006; 2012) critiqued community art for emphasizing ethics over aesthetics, we understand
that project documentation (often of group brainstorming and sticky notes) is not enough to
inspire larger audiences. As designers, filmmakers, and artists, we have the potential to
breathe life into imaginative concepts and create rich, representations that offer affective
pleasure as well as provocative arguments for society. The more immersive and participatory
the final project, the better, as audiences can better experience, interact, and scrutinize -
coming up with their own imaginative concepts and variations.

5.) Balancing systems and people: While modernist planners failed to see the human-
centric perspective of design, utopian political and artistic interventions are often temporary
and short-lived. Anticipatory design seeks to find a balance between designing large-scale
systemic perspectives with the embodied and pedestrian experience of socio-technological
systems. Similar to brown’s notion of “emergent strategies” (brown, 2017a), anticipatory
design moves from the bottom-up with an ultimate goal for a widespread network that tackles
complicated “wicked problems”. The process of scaling from workshop-based initiatives is
difficult, but is absolutely necessary in the face of global economic and ecological challenges
that face our world.

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C. Trajectory from Project Backstory

As I discussed in Chapter 3, the Sankofa City project is part of a longer-term
collaboration, started in the South Los Angeles community of Leimert Park – a neighborhood
famous for African-American culture, arts, and music. The current construction of a new
subway line through Leimert Park to the LAX airport threatens significant ethnic and population
shifts. In response, Ben Caldwell, François Bar, Benjamin Stokes, and I started The Leimert
Phone Company in 2012 as a design collaborative, bringing together Caldwell’s Kaos Network
community art center and the Annenberg Innovation Lab at University of Southern California
(USC). While Bar and Stokes were in the Annenberg School of communication, I came from the
School of Cinematic Arts. Our interdisciplinary team has evolved our strategies over the years
and shifted between different project leads. For the Sankofa City project, I took the lead in
developing a methodology and implementing the workshop series with Ben Caldwell.
Initially, our collaborative project began by running rapid-prototyping workshops to
empower community-student groups to create technological interventions in the built
environment. Groups repurposed pre-existing urban furniture (payphones, bus benches,
newspaper boxes, and community gardens) to create novel interactive design objects (Figure
23) that reinforced local culture and history. By focusing on urban furniture, the projects
intervened in public space. As the new subway will connect Leimert Park to the rest of the city,
there will inevitably be an influx of outside populations. Rather than be defensive or self-
victimizing, the project participants sought to create public technologies that reinforce local
culture by facilitating meaningful encounters or directing outsiders to engage with local history
and institutions.
With fears of gentrification, cultural preservation was still a central theme. Moreover, our
goal was to shift from designing technology for a neighborhood to planning technology as part

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of the neighborhood. By repurposing unused payphones and other public furniture, our
designs sought to not only reinforce the identity of the neighborhood but also create new forms
of civic engagement and social rituals. Our participatory design method is structured around
uncovering the Leimert Park communities’ values and desired behavior and creating new
socio-technological systems that facilitate those desires rather than reinforce dominant cultural
logics of either redevelopment or the “Californian Ideology” (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006; Gray,
2005; Barbrook & Cameron, 1996)

The Californian Ideology is a shorthand for social liberalism
combined with a techno-utopianism that often circumvents or undermines state and union
protections.
Inspired by the work of adrienne maree brown (2017a) and her “emergent strategies”,
our work sought to empower our small band of individuals to present projects to the public and
inspire larger change. The teams work together to share their various cultural, artistic, and
technical knowledge sets. After our first design series, we held a public “pitchfest” to get
feedback from other community members and invited experts in the field. This point is vital, as
many theorists (e.g., Jean Luc Nancy, Chantal Mouffe; discussed in Chapter 3) have shown,
community can never be preconceived or essentialized. Rather, people cluster around
particular practices and institutions, like the Kaos Network which Ben Caldwell runs.
Since the intitial pitchfest, we have run a series of workshops and presented our
projects globally. We have presented our project and run one-day workshops at multiple
conferences, from Detroit to Denmark. In 2017, as an extension of the Sankofa City project, we
ran a weeklong workshop in Chicago. We have also taught multiple classes at USC, with one
class in 2014 leading to the construction of a pedestrian-plaza through LADOT. In order to gain
public support for the pedestrian plaza, we first temporarily created the plaza through simple
“tactical urbanism” techniques of blocking of the street for one day. During this event we
showcased our urban design concepts and gathered signatures to permanently install the

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plaza. By working over a longer horizon, we can collectively experiment and develop a range of
initiatives and projects to work from ideation to implementation.

Figure 22: The Futures Cone of possible, plausible, probable, and preferable futures. Courtesy of Stuart
Candy.

The projects have increasingly focused on real-world interventions that can help change
the physical and social experience of the neighborhood. The next logical step was to
increasingly design the future in order to think broader and more long-term. As I’ve argued
throughout this dissertation, science fiction and speculative design have radical potentials for
addressing contemporary issues and taking radical leaps towards idealized (but nonetheless
historically founded) models of the future.
While the Leimert Phone Company projects repurposed familiar urban objects, the
Sankofa City project co-designs emerging or yet-to-exist technologies. The project worked
with community participants to define their preferable futures (Dunne & Raby, 2013; Candy,
2010), often tied to local African-American cultural norms and social practices. As Stuart
Candy (2010)’s cone of possible futures represents, a preferable future (Figure 22) is an ideal
outcome of multiple futures, determined by policies and collective, emergent activities. By
focusing on speculative technologies, participants were given a greater sense of imaginative

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freedom. Our method used “what if” questions (drawn from world building and speculative
design) to define creative constraints and provoke brainstorming. These questions ripple out
across multiple interrelated domains (transportation, ecology, culture, economy, law, etc.) that
are then represented through a series of entry points (Coulton, Lindley, Sturdee, & Stead,
2017), such as design objects, scenarios, and design fictions.

Figure 23: Group concept of autonomous shuttles carrying tourists and local residents, as drones fly
over to trade locally grown food with other neighborhoods.

The participants determined the designs and scenarios that were generated thereafter.
They created a range of concepts in the form of simple prototypes, urban models, collages,
and a final design fiction video. Participant groups gravitated towards certain “what if”
conceptual domains over others, revealing that the methodology was useful for generating
designs and also tracking design frictions (Forlano & Mathew, 2014) – i.e. concepts that did not
resonate with local participants. The participants developed a wide range of designs across

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domains: (a) self-driving public shuttles (Figure 23) that dynamically display local history for
tourists or act as paratransit for local citizens, (b) socially networked shoes that search for
nearby events, (c) augmented reality glasses that overlay “deep time” and ancestral history
onto the present, and (d) a musical park equipped with a sensor-based public garden that
provides food while offering activities for unemployed youth and the homeless (Figure 26).
Each concept was a synthesis of community participants’ and university students’
collaborations, designed to address local issues and community desires for the future. Working
with community participants then helps to provide a more “informed imaginative projection”
(DiSalvo, Jenkins, & Lodato, 2016) of the future than traditional design models, that is
grounded in their lived experience and represents their desires and concerns. Over time,
participatory speculative design can build technical capacity while gaining novel HCI insights
and fostering alternative cultures of innovation.
D. The Anticipatory Design Process

It [Design Fiction] is a way of materializing ideas and speculations without the pragmatic
curtailing that often happens when dead weights are fastened to the imagination.
-Julian Bleecker, “A Short Essay on Design Fiction” (2009: p. 6)

The “Sankofa City” project teamed USC students with local residents, musicians, and
artists. All workshops took place at the Kaos Network art center in Leimert Park, with another
workshop at the USC film school’s green screen stage to film a design fiction video. The
workshops were run as an experimental course, facilitated by myself and Ben Caldwell, along
with support from François Bar (Benjamin Stokes is now a professor in Washington, DC).
Workshops met for twelve weeks, culminating with a final public presentation at the end. The

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total participant size varied from week to week, peaking at 16 participants in the early weeks.
After the first five (of twelve) weeks, the participant numbers dwindled to an average of eight
participants.
Participants included 4 enrolled students, 2 occasional students, 2-9 community
participants (ranging from ages 15 to 72), and 2-4 organizers. All of the community participants
were African-American, with six living in Leimert Park and the other three regularly visiting the
neighborhood for cultural events. The community participants mostly had backgrounds in fine
arts (music, photography, and arts education) and were interested in the social potential of new
technology. As one participant answered in our survey, “I want to use virtual reality and world
building to educate and improve the lives of all.” Others found the workshop series a
welcomed alternative to more official municipal planning meetings, which they saw as time
consuming and deliberation intensive.
The USC students were interdisciplinary, with majors in Media Arts, Design, Art History,
Cinema Studies, and Urban Planning. Two were PhD students while the other four were
undergraduates. One unexpected participant was a design graduate student - from the
ArtCenter in Pasadena - who is developing public autonomous-shuttles. Guest speakers were
also invited, including urban designer Daveed Kapoor, local historians Clint Rosemond, Steven
Isoardi, and Jeffrey Winston, AR designer BC Biermann, critical race professor Taj Frazer,
game designer Richard LeMarchand, media theorist Henry Jenkins, and world building
designer Alex McDowell.

The process included 3 phases, plus a final exhibition:

1.) Brainstorming – high level concepts organized around “what if” hypothetical questions and
systematically imagining the neighborhood. Groups rotated weekly.

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2.) Prototyping – groups solidify to create personas and prototypes (wearables and urban
objects) engaging the larger systematic concepts.

3.) Design Fictions –designs and personas synthesize into scenarios to create design fiction
collages and a video.

4.) Presentation – groups present their collages and videos to a local planning committee of
community stakeholders.

This workshop process began with a broad set of ideas and then siphoned down to a
more focused set of particular designs, personas, and scenario collages/videos. Throughout
the process, we intentionally balanced futurist provocations with local history and existing
urban forms, as well as systemic approaches with human-centric design perspectives. Moving
from 1-3, the process became increasingly technical, scaffolding knowledge from the findings
to guide what element of the technologies to adopt. Because of the speculative nature of this
project, the technological designs will help push our collective imagination and provide
concrete models for the future. Ultimately, this project is about designing the future of public
and architectural space before it can be co-opted by the conservatism of redevelopment.
Before we can design forms, we must first design our imaginations.
1. Speculative “What if” Questions
To envision the future, we used hypothetical “what if” questions to guide the process,
acting as provocations (Pendleton-Jullian & Brown, 2018; Cechanowicz, Cantrell, & McDowell,
2016; Forlano & Mathew, 2014; Hauser, Desjardins, & Wakkary, 2014; Dunne & Raby, 2013;

289
Tariq, Zeitoun, Valancius, Feamster, & Ammar, 2008) to trigger the participants’ imagination
while creating a structure for brainstorming. Rather than completely open-ended questions,
workshops benefit from thematic constraints to focus designs from becoming purely
fantastical. The questions ranged from socializing new technology (e.g. self-driving cars) to
more structural issues (e.g. sustainable gardening and no private property). Below are the
provocations listed from specific to general:

1. Autonomous Vehicles: What if self-driving shuttles replaced privately owned vehicles?
2. City as Instrument: What if the city could be played like a musical instrument?
3. Gardening Community: What if the city was built around community gardening/farming?
4. No Private Property: What if there was no private property and no policing?

The questions were created by the organizers, based on Ben Caldwell’s outreach and
insights into ongoing issues within the community. As Forlano and Mathew (2014) argue, the
benefit of participatory speculative design is “to move beyond discussions of urban problems
and solutions, and towards a more generative future-oriented space” (p. 8). While the
questions may appear speculative, the source of issues were real.

What if? Issues and Concerns
Autonomous Vehicles Traffic, parking, and attention
City as Musical Instrument Cultural heritage and engagement

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Garden Community Sustainability and healthy food options
No Private Property Homelessness, affordability and policing
Table 1: “What if” prompts tied to local issues.
2. Initial Outcomes, Issues and linking Culture to Technology
As groups synthesized their designs, there was a noticeable trend in which “what if”
questions persisted and which slipped away. For example, ideas generated from the No
Private Property group were not present by the fourth week. This may indicate that the prompt
was too open-ended or systematically complex. While City as Musical Instrument and Garden
Community were not tied to one single technology, they immediately conjured up design
objects. Participants could quickly grasp urban furniture, musical instruments, and urban
farming. In contrast, No Private Property appeared too abstract and required a more drastic
leap away from our current property-based economic system. In trying to tackle economic
issues as well as homelessness and policing, the concept proved too vast and slippery for the
allotted workshop time.
While No Private Property was an explicit prompt against privatization, the other
questions intuitively generated alternative economic practices. The Gardening Community
group imagined collective urban farms that functioned through shared labor, training programs
(for unemployed youth or homeless), and non-monetary exchange. The Autonomous Vehicles
group imagined self-driving shuttles as shared work spaces or pop-up play places. The City as
Instrument group imagined interactive musical parks for public collaboration. Rather than
introduce alternatives to private property from the top-down, groups organically imagined
designs that modeled alternative socio-technical systems to our current neoliberal economy.

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Throughout the workshop process, it was invaluable to re-present the generated
concepts and develop a shared vocabulary. Even at the stage of brainstorming and paper
prototyping, technology can be conceptually challenging. As new community participants
rotated in, some were alienated by casual uses of design and technology jargon (like
augmented reality), or had deep-rooted distrust of autonomous technologies like self-driving
cars. Unfortunately, these alienated feelings were not brought up during the discussion but
expressed to Ben Caldwell after the fact. As Kafai, Peppler, and Chiu (2007) found from
teaching computer programming in South Los Angeles, community-based technology
education programs cannot simply focus on technical literacy but must also emphasize
normative dimensions for long-term cultural adoption.
During the brainstorming process, we worked to develop conceptual frameworks or
designs that linked these alienating technologies to community cultural history and social
practices. We referenced the contemporary artistic movement of Afrofuturism (Womack, 2013;
Dery, 1994), which has developed a rich array of African-American concepts and aesthetics
tied to technology. However, it was the participants who developed more specific and nuanced
approaches to culturally framing new technologies.
One group envisioned an innovation incubator as part of the legacy of inventor George
Washington Carver and educator Booker T. Washington, pioneering figures for 19
th
century
African-American civil and intellectual rights. Another older (and highly dedicated) participant
imagined augmented reality glasses that overlay ancestral temporalities (Figure 24) within the
present. By pairing spiritual beliefs and cultural history with the technology, participants found
more meaningful engagement.

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Figure 24: High school student’s concept for networked sneakers (left) and older participant’s concept
for augmented reality glasses to see ancestral spirits and “deep time” (right).

Additionally, groups created designs tied to current values and practices. The one high
school participant imagined sneakers (Figure 24) that would notify the wearer – through
vibrations – whenever their friends were having a nearby pop-up basketball game. The design
spoke to real urban issues (i.e., lacking park space) as well as linking youth values (i.e., sneaker
culture) to new technologies. Another group used drums as an interface for controlling urban
ubiquitous computing systems. They imagined a drum that could control shading structures for
community gardens, creating an interactive musical ritual tied to the rotation of the earth.
Beyond technical literacy, community world building must sustain conceptual frames that
merge technology design with local worldviews.
3. Building and Scaling designs
The community workshops strategically alternated between top-down systemic
perspectives and bottom-up human centric designs. One week, groups created future
neighborhood models out of foam, plastic, and wood. Another week, participants prototyped
augmented reality glasses and wearable technology (Figure 4). Shifting between the systemic
and the human-centric fostered conversations and designs that could create an ecosystem of

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modular and interrelated activities. Each individual design object was not an isolated element,
but were Things (DiSalvo, Lukens, Lodato, Jenkins, & Kim, 2014; Björgvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren,
2010; Latour, 2004; Latour, 2005) - socio-material assemblages that generated relationships
between people and places.

Figure 25. Neighborhood design (left) and rapid-prototyping wearables (right). Photos by Karl Baumann.

After the initial brainstorming, groups worked together to create cardboard and plastic
models of their idealized future neighborhoods. These models gave participants a chance to
work through the interrelated domains and concretize their ideas into a physical model. Before
constructing the models, groups explored the neighborhood to identify sites that they wanted
to reinforce or activate. They often sought to reinforce institutions that were culturally or
economically significant, especially ones with a longstanding history in the neighborhood.
Here, community participant knowledge was vital for providing insights to understanding the
cultural complexity of the built environment.
Groups then sought to activate sites that were underutilized. For example, there are a
number of large parking lots in Leimert Park that are half empty. If shared autonomous vehicles

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replaced private automobiles, these spaces would become irrelevant. One group proposed to
replace these sites with community gardens that would provide affordable healthy food
options, while decreasing the heating effects of such massive concrete areas. Thus, the initial
world building about transportation triggered design concepts tied to food systems and local
ecology.
Along the process, participants (especially students) developed a richer understanding
of the neighborhood. Inspired by Kevin Lynch’s “mental maps” (1960), I had participants draw
their visions of the neighborhood, as a way of tracking what stood out to them and what was
left blank. The process was meant to simultaneously deepen participants’ understanding of the
area while imagining its future. Through an anticipatory and critical utopic lens, participants
creatively projected a future from engaging with its present form and past history. Rather than
speculate from a purely conceptual vantage point, the point of anticipatory design is to build
upon pre-existing cultural, social, and architectural structures.

4. Entry Points into the Future

After four weeks of rotating groups to cross-pollinate ideas, we finalized groups to
create personas, prototypes, and scenarios. These scenarios would provide entry points for the
public into our collaborative future world. Groups created personas (Blythe, 2014; Martins,
2014) to focus on individual users and ground designs in the community experience. Their
personas were based on local community members (sometimes the participants themselves)
and imagined “visitor” personas, since the neighborhood is focused on cultural preservation in
the face of urban development. Teams created a constellation (Baumann, Stokes, Bar, &
Caldwell, 2016) of design objects – both wearable tech and urban objects – that related to the
personas’ backstories and encounters. These constellations of urban design objects focused

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on the modular interrelationship between objects and the larger civic complexity of their
neighborhood.
Groups then created scenarios (Howard, Carroll, Murphy, & Peck, 2002) that
synthesized their personas and urban technologies. They created visual collages of a day-in-
the-life in their future neighborhood, often interweaving multiple domains to show the
modularity of their concepts. For example, the garden based design (Figure 26) represented (a)
an interactive musical fountain to activate the local park, (b) continuing the culture of drum
circles, and (c) a community garden that has sensors to keep track of water levels. The
autonomous vehicle group showed (a) vehicles could have AR history tours for visitors, (b)
paratransit for local families, and (c) drones to trade produce across neighborhoods. Each
design team moved across multiple domains to consider a range of issues tied to
transportation, cultural history, multi-generational needs, and food systems/ecology.

Figure 26: Group concept for community garden and interactive music installation in the park.
5. Final Video and Public Presentation
In each of our previous community design projects, we have created design fiction
videos (Tanenbaum, 2014; Dourish & Bell, 2014; Blythe, 2014; Bleecker, 2009) to utilize the
power of movie making (echoing science fiction) to visualize our speculative designs. For this

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project, we went a step further to use 3D modeling and visual effects (VFX) to present designs
that we could not build. The video [vimeo.com/198151192] represented the experience of an
international tourist driving through Leimert Park in an augmented reality enabled autonomous
shuttle and becoming enraptured by the rich local musical history and architecture. While we
initially planned to create 3 short films, the time constraints combined with waning participation
after the first six weeks, lead us to collectively create one video. Ideally, the multiple videos
would have given a more nuanced representation of the multiple groups and better support
agonistic perspectives of the future. Nonetheless, the video proved to be compelling in our
public presentation.

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Figure 27: Stills from design fiction video showcasing international tourist visiting Leimert Park.

The final outcome of our workshop series was a public presentation at a local
stakeholders and planning meeting. This group represented older and more established
community members (many were business and property owners). Our participants presented
seven collages (as seen in Figure 23, 24, and 26) and the final design fiction video (Figure 27) to
provoke dialogue about long-term strategies for developing new technologies. The video was
particularly effective. It showed a tourist riding in an augmented reality equipped self-driving
car, which dynamically played archival history footage along the route. The video scenario
represented desirable socio-technical systems that benefited the local economy and
perpetuated local cultural practices. Community attendees said that they were “inspired” and
requested to be a part of our future workshop series. The event organizer claimed it was “the
first time I’ve seen USC do something significant…where urban planning and community
values and taste are brought together.” His statement spoke to an appreciation of the
community world building process and not just the designs.

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E. Dissertation Project Discussion

Designing urban futures is a multi-dimensional issue that requires end-user
involvement. Previous HCI work has developed methods for participatory design that
democratize the design process, or digital civics (Asad, Le Dantec, Nielsen, & Diedrick, 2017;
Balestrini et al., 2017; Richardson, Crivellaro, Kharrufa, Montague, & Olivier, 2017) that deepen
community engagement in city management, civic learning, and data collection. By shifting to
explore speculative futures, we can collaboratively propose imagined systems and collective
visions. Rather than wait for dominant models of autonomous vehicles, ubiquitous computing,
and mixed reality to take form, anticipatory design seeks to intervene at the point of conceptual
planning.
By grounding speculation within a community framework, future-facing HCI methods
also gain diverse perspectives that expand the scope of possibilities. Communities outside of
the design world have the potential to introduce unexpected solutions and designs. Within our
process, groups proposed novel HCI artefacts and interfaces (e.g., UIxD drums and socially-
networked sneakers) that are valued by the community but may have not been imagined by our
university design team.
Community feedback also draws attention to our own value assumptions as
technologists or designers. While we had a devoted group, issues in recruiting reflected a
distrust of technologies (e.g. autonomous vehicles) that remove human agency - or a sense of
alienation from technical language like augmented reality. These issues were not so apparent in
our previous workshops around urban furniture (payphones, bus benches, etc.). The negative
responses to emerging technology reinforce the insight that issues in the technological
“participation gap” (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robison, 2009) are not always
about access or literacy, but also cultural disconnections.

299
For some, emerging technologies can be seen as a threat to established lifestyles and
social practices. The future ultimately will bring change. In urban communities facing increasing
housing displacement, future changes are not assumed to be positive. Therefore, the process
of community-based speculative design is one that develops a preferable future with a
continuum to the past. Our participant groups articulated ways to integrate computing
platforms within deeply relevant cultural themes, such as connection to ancestors, to the
lineage of African-American inventors, and to the rich neighborhood history of jazz. The design
process indicated the importance of finding cultural frameworks, traditions, or metaphors that
linked emerging technologies to the value systems and practices of the community (Forlano &
Mathew, 2014; Kafai, Peppler, & Chiu, 2007). The final scenario video and collages were
effective for showcasing how emerging and speculative technologies can enhance local
cultural and economic practices.

F. Follow up Projects and Ongoing Prototyping Efforts

After the initial public presentation, our group created a longer seven minute video
[vimeo.com/211625350]. The film builds upon the initial design fiction video of the international
visitor taking an augmented reality history tour in a self-driving car. The longer film incorporates
more of the group design concepts, such as drum-based interfaces that control shade
structures over gardens, the socially networked shoes, and a wearable technology that
measures toxicity levels (Figure 7). The longer film also develops the international tourist’s
backstory to show that she has lost connection to her past country of origin, which left due to
extreme drought - hinting at the dystopian edges of our future world. Once arriving to Leimert
Park, she meets another young woman (who may be part cyborg) named Alma (played by a
workshop participant), who introduces the tourist to the “sankofa” augmented reality

300
experience that sees ancestral spirits. From there, they join a drum circle of older women and
Alma’s father Joshua (played by a workshop participant) to connect with the spirits of the
neighborhood. The film represents a bridge between different generations and showcases
Leimert Park as an oasis for international citizens of the African Diaspora. Rather than display
speculative technology for its own sake, the film interweaves the ways in which it helps to
support local culture, represent the deep past, and connect people across generational and
national lines.
This film has been embraced by local planning groups and played during multiple
community events, such as the annual Martin Luther King Jr. parade in Crenshaw - the biggest
of its kind in the Los Angeles area. The short film was also shown at the 2018 Pan African Film
Festival, along other Afrofuturist and science fiction short films. The film festival venue
highlights the ways in which design fiction videos can travel outside of their original context to
larger public venues. Rather than isolate our discussions to either elitist art galleries or
hyperlocal community meetings, the video format allows a much broader and general impact
for provoking new dialogue about community futures.
However, the linear format of video is still limiting for fully representing the modularity of
the design concepts. For example, the video focuses on a tourist riding an autonomous vehicle
to learn about the history of the neighborhood. But it does not show other autonomous vehicle
concepts they were developed in the community workshop, such as using the vehicle as local
paratransit for the elderly - or roaming play spaces or karaoke booths for local youth.
Moreover, the single, linear film in many ways mirrors a consensus-based democracy rather
than an agonistic democracy. In the process of creating the film, we collectively combined all
group concepts and had a group dialogue to weave them all into one linear film. This
discussion took place late in the process of the project and did not represent all of the
participants who had initially joined during the first month. Moreover, one participant during

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this discussion wanted to create a more dystopian, “what if” scenario such as a global drought
or a dying sun. While the tourist’s backstory makes reference to drought in her birth country,
we did not embrace the larger-scale global disaster direction. An interactive experience could
potentially represent multiple visions (some even contradictory) in order to better represent an
agonistic democratic model.
As discussed in Chapter 1, interactive VR environments or physical enactments (Candy
& Dunagan, 2017; Elsden et al., 2017) would be excellent formal additions to complement the
video scenarios and allow public participants to experience and physically test out the full
range of possibilities for proposed speculative designs. In retrospect, the “tactical urbanism”
plaza event in 2015 (as discussed in Chapter 2), in which we temporarily closed a road for local
pedestrians to test our prototypes, was more effective in overcoming the “experiential gulf” of
video representations. The plaza event provided a moment for everyday people to physically
engage with prototypes and participate in the affordances and physical potentials of the
designs. For example, while a visitor was playing the “beat bench” design, another passerby
stopped and began to freestyle rap over the beat. This interaction was both spontaneous and
not directly represented in the design (though surely part of the affordances). Since our
workshop series, Ben Caldwell has worked with a group called “The Seeds of Carver” to install
vegetable planters around his building. These analogue steps are examples of how to begin
implementing small scale changes to the overall collective vision. Moreover, his collaboration
with Seeds of Carver shows the ways in which this project is one node in a larger network of
community arts and activism in the Leimert Park neighborhood.
The video was used precisely because the designs were beyond our technological and
financial fabrication means. But there are nevertheless other possibilities for prototyping such
concepts. While some of the ubiquitous computing and mixed reality proposals are beyond our
immediate technical and product design skills, phone-based AR applications and virtual reality

302
experiences provide the potential to step inside such experiences and give feedback to future
research and development.
Since the final video, our loose collaboration has created one virtual reality prototype
and is in the process of creating another one. Our Art Center design collaborator, named Raul
“Retro” Poblano has used 3D printing and lightweight metals to create a full size mockup of the
self-driving shuttle. Once seated inside the shuttle, viewers can put on a HTC Vive to
experience a Unity-based 3D simulation of driving in the shuttle with other passengers.
Poblano and his collaborator Stephan Pak have created a number of scenes to showcase
multiple possible scenarios and the modular possibilities of the design. The VR experience
became part of Poblano’s final dissertation at the Art Center. Poblano hopes to launch an
actual company to work with cities to create self-driving shuttles tied to local communities and
manufactured nearby.
Now, Ben Caldwell and I are creating an interactive virtual reality film with the USC
Jaunt Lab. Building upon the idea of augmented reality glasses that show the deep history of a
neighborhood, we are creating a time-traveling science fiction piece. The virtual reality
experience will give audiences a greater sense of the feeling of juxtaposing different time
periods onto their physical space, while engaging their body. The project will allow audiences
to access multiple fictional scenes across time: 1970s funk band performance, precolonial
ancestral drum circle, and a cosmic scene beyond time. Moreover, the project will be
purposefully modular and open, so additional scenes can be shot in the future and added to
the project. Additionally, the 360 VR footage could be incorporated into Retro’s prototype, in
order to deepen the sense of immersion into the Leimert Park cultural history and practices.
While the video is a powerful entry point, other real-world implementations and multimedia
prototyping experiences need to be continually developed in conjunction with the storytelling
and ideation that drives their inception.

303
Nevertheless, video is still particularly powerful for visualizing more nebulous concepts
and for wider community engagement. Our video showcases the ways in which conceptual
and speculative technology can add social value to the existing fabric of the neighborhood.
Additionally, the film (like other Afrofuturist work) provides rich representations of black actors
outside of the limiting portrayals of dominant cinema, which often focuses on slavery or urban
poverty (Womack, 2013). As Ben Caldwell and multiple other local residents have claimed,
there is a powerful emotional sense of pride and hope to see blackness in the future,
celebrated for all of the rich cultural activity, traditions, and social beliefs. Afrofuturism is not
merely another subgenre of science fiction but a real potent representational strategy for
collective empowerment and emotional therapy in the face of historic trauma and a dominant
society that has consistently marginalized and devalued black experiences and existence.
Thus, the imaginative spectacle provides a utopic opening for a future horizon that helps to
provide hope against a traumatic social history.
IV. Conclusion

Processus cum figures, figurae in processu.
(The process is made by those who are made by the process.)
- Ernst Bloch

Building new worlds is deeply tied to space. However, utopia does not have to be
imagined solely as a place. Rather, it is more useful to conceptualize utopia as a praxis
towards a never-finished project of building a better world. Instead of conceiving a perfect,
top-down system created by experts or a master planner, utopia can be opened to create a
democratic process for engaging communities to reimagine their everyday lives. This process

304
is “emergent”, as adrienne maree brown points to the ways in which collective individual
actions can percolate to create systemic changes. This process can also reclaim the “cultural
surplus” of mass media and pop cultural creations to tap into wider audiences’ emotional
connections and mobilize around pressing social issues. Drawing inspiration from these and
other similar “imaginactivism” and “civic imagination” concepts, anticipatory design aims to
formalize a methodology for designing aesthetic artefacts and stories to express collaborative
desires for the future.
Anticipatory design expands upon other future-facing design methods by incorporating
everyday citizens to design systematically and speculatively. By working with diverse
interdisciplinary teams and local communities, design can empower populations to imagine
alternative future designs for multidimensional issues. Focusing on imaginative possibilities
frees participants to explore ideas and connections, with less deference to expert
contributions. Long-term structural envisioning can also suggest more immediate planning
strategies. By engaging with local citizens in a speculative process, the anticipatory process
helped them to articulate a variety of design concepts into a shared vision to provoke future
conversations and brainstorming. As we imagine new infrastructures for a better world, we
must also create collaborative infrastructures and normative technological frameworks for
increasing everyday participation into the design process. In the end, this method is about
materializing collective dreams into holistic design scenarios to potentially influence the
implementation of future socio-technical systems.

305
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Conclusion: Infrastructures of the Imagination

A. Why Utopia Matters

As I write this conclusion, Black Panther (2018) is in its second weekend of record-
breaking sales. With $242.1 million its first weekend and $112 million during its second
weekend (D’Alessandro, 2018), Black Panther had the second highest grossing box office
weekend (behind Star Wars: Force Awakens) and maintained the smallest second weekend
box office decrease ever for a Marvel film. It is the highest grossing film ever for a black
director (USC alumni Ryan Coogler). The Marvel/Disney superhero film focuses on the fictional
African nation of Wakanda, which possesses the most advanced technology in the world. Its
king T’challa (played by Chadwick Boseman) is the Black Panther, who like other superheroes,
dresses in tights and fights against international villains. Unlike other superheroes, the Black
Panther works with and relies on a network of female warriors and agents. His sister, Princess
Shuri (played by Letitia Wright) is the lead inventor in Wakanda’s research and development
lab. And in a reversal of traditional Hollywood films, there are only three white secondary
characters amongst a large star-studded cast that represents a spectrum of African and
African-American characters. The film’s financial success proves the potential for diverse
representations of cultures and characters beyond white America or Europe. But the film’s
larger celebration within the public, particularly with African and African-American
communities, proves why representation matters and how popular cinema fuels the “civic
imagination”. Black Panther has opened a new sphere for black cosplayers (Thompson-
Hernández, 2018) as well as fueled activist (Busch, 2018) and community groups (Lockhart,
2018), with efforts ranging from children’s education to voter registration.

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As a $200 million budget film (Setoodeh, 2018), great detail and expense was put into
the VFX and world building. Black Panther is one of the few films in which the “excess” or
“cultural surplus” of the film’s design links directly to the narrative and rhetoric of the film. The
capital city of Wakanda represents an advanced urban center tied to traditional African culture.
The streets are always full with a robust public of pedestrians traveling to markets and stores,
happily chatting along the way. There are no cars. Rather, there is a slow-moving street level
trolley and high-speed above ground trains. Unlike Blade Runner (1982), which implicitly
argues for the value of private cars and private property, Wakanda explicitly argues for an
urbanism that focuses on the commonwealth and shared resources. Wakanda is
conceptualized and represented as utopia.
But utopia cannot exist as a distant place, a closed system away from the ills of less
perfect spaces and places. Indeed, the bulk of the narrative focuses on Black Panther’s
attempt to stop an arms dealer (played by Andy Serkis) from selling their advanced technology.
Black Panther (or King T’Challa) is driven not just by a moral attempt to stop the weapons from
getting into the wrong hands, but also because of Wakanda’s policy of secrecy and isolation.
The dramatic climax and rhetorical core of the film centers around a battle between T’Challa
and N'Jadaka (played by Michael B. Jordan). While T’Challa wants Wakanda to remain isolated
and shrouded in secrecy, N’Jadaka wants to arm the underclasses of the world with
Wakanda’s advanced weaponry in order to rise up and revolt against their historical
oppressors. Unbeknownst to most of the kingdom, N’Jadaka grew up in an impoverished
neighborhood of Oakland, after his father was killed by the former king (T’Challa’s father) in an
internal dispute. Harden by his experience in Oakland and witnessing the racism of America,
N’Jadaka is deeply disturbed that Wakanda would stand idle and not intervene on behalf of
others. In their final battle, N’Jadaka is mortally wounded but refuses medical attention,

315
defiantly claiming, “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, 'cause
they knew death was better than bondage.”
Ultimately, King T’Challa realizes that N’Jadaka was right. Wakanda cannot simply live
as an isolated utopia, but can use its power to help support those of the African diaspora.
Rather than guns and weapons, T’Challa seeks to provide education and technology. In the
film’s conclusion, the king goes to Oakland to visit the condemned project building where
N’Jadaka grew up. In that building, T’Challa commits to creating a youth center to provide
young black and brown children with the opportunity and access to advanced technology and
the necessary education needed to wield its potential. In the end, utopia is shifted from a place
to a praxis. The wonderment of Wakanda’s world building becomes a projected promise for
audiences to imagine in their own cities and neighborhoods. Rather than the historically
impoverished representations of the black experience in dominant cinema, the film explicitly
argues for a black civic imagination that weds advanced technology with traditional African
societies and aesthetics.
Recently, USC Urban Planning PhD student Matthew Miller wrote an article entitled
“Learning from Wakanda: Five Innovations to Afrofuturism for Black Creators”, in which he
argues for a “politics of triumph” that highlights black excellence and plans for the immediate
futures. Citing our Sankofa City design project, in which he was an early
participant/collaborator, Miller (2018) claims:

I noticed that, in depicting a future Leimert Park Village as a tech-enhanced “Sankofa
City,” we were actually not speculating about an unforeseen, distant future. 2050 is only
32 years in the future...if we want Black speculative fiction to be politically powerful, let’s
identify some real dates and fantasize about it. One of the key rules of activism is that
you give your audience something in the short-term to do. Focusing so far into a linear,

316
dystopic future untethers the audience from their current reality. We structure our own
defeat by making present far-flung wins with politically-disengaged audiences.

Miller highlights the ways in which the power of speculative fiction can be wedded with activist
and urban planning agendas. Throughout his article, he points to the necessity of tying
speculative fiction to history and the need to “build new worlds in existing settings”. By
marrying the imaginative with the real world issues and communities, Afrofuturism and Black
speculative fiction can push the possibilities of self-determination and community potential.
Utopian thinking and science fiction are not mere fantasy, but tools for creating a better world
in the present and near future. The next step is to create infrastructures of the imagination that
allow everyday citizens and communities to participate in this process and democratize the
future.

B. Infrastructures of the Imagination and Anticipatory Design

Infrastructures of the imagination is an umbrella term for identifying projects and
practices that work to imagine future or alternative societies and/or create structures for public
participation and dialogue. It is a reciprocal relationship between the process of imagining new
worlds and the act of creating new socio-technological systems and urban spaces. We inhabit
the dreams of the past which create the foundation for us to dream of the future.
Anticipatory design is then a nascent methodology that I have developed in my own
work, based on studying other projects and practices that represent the larger conceptual
framework of infrastructures of the imagination. The method is small and local, but tackles
major global issues. The method is utopian and future-facing, but is ground in the cultural

317
history of its location. And most of all, it depends on community engagement and citizen
participation to present collective visions based upon diverse contributions.
As I’ve highlighted through this dissertation, there are three dimensions to
infrastructures of the imagination:

1.) Envisioning the Future - creating provocative images, stories, and interactive
media to inspire the public imagination.
2.) Building Spaces - experimenting in public spaces to test out concepts and
gather embodied understandings of an envisioned future.
3.) Forming Communities - empowering community participation through open
democratic processes in order to represent diverse desires and concepts.

1. Envisioning the Future

In order to create a better future, one must first envision it. We envision not just the
technology but also the human element - the pleasures, pains, desires and rewards that
accompany imagined socio-technical transformation. By envisioning the human dimension, the
public can see themselves as participants and/or critics of the proposed vision. The human
dimensions include affective meaning, social connections, rituals, and embodied pleasure. The
power of art, media, and design is to represent through aesthetics all of these dimensions in a
coherent assemblage of characters, objects, and environments. While certain representations
use grand spectacles (Hollywood science fiction films) or playful conceptualism (speculative
design), others speak in more subtle or mundane representations (design fiction). All of these
strategies have their own value but a balanced approach is ideal. The mundane may appear as
mere practical proposal, while the conceptual can be illegible, and the spectacular overly

318
whimsical. Anticipatory design and world building is uniquely positioned because it
methodologically works out the minutiae of grand spectacles as well as the socio-ecological
systems where design objects reside.
However, there are limits to still or video images. As media evolves in immersion and
interactivity, designers can overcome the limits of linear storytelling and static design objects.
Video games represent complex systems that can be played through in order to uncover their
underlying model and meaning. Embodied experiences like virtual, augmented, and mixed
reality offer new sensory dimensions to complex speculative projects and representations.
Video games and interactive media leverage computational systems to create more
complicated representations and simulations of emergent systems. Audiences and players can
work through and test various approaches in order to learn causal relationships and
consequences of the system, mapping out the designers’ underlying arguments. Ideally, the
game would offer a bottom-up perspective as well to ground the systematic approach at the
level of the individual. Ultimately, the more an audience can engage with a vision of the future,
the more they can grapple the complexity and see beyond the initial awe of a spectacular
image.

2. Building Spaces and Prototyping the Future

The city is the bedrock of human civilization because it is the testing ground of
unexpected innovations, emergent behavior, and new hybrid cultures. In order to build new
worlds, designers, artists, and planners should engage everyday citizens to enhance these
latent potentials. Moving away from top-down planning and oversimplified models, new urban
forms should depend upon engaging with the rich complexity of the urban social fabric and
embrace bottom-up participatory initiatives. Ethical spectacles, tactical interventions, and

319
experimental occupations create massive, open-ended events that suspend the dominated
nature of urban space and open a place for playing out and learning new possibilities. From lo-
fi temporary urban interventions to ubiquitous computing systems, the city can be
reconfigurable and modular to augment everyday citizens’ experience of the city.
As urban spaces develop and technological systems are introduced, there must always
be an attentive engagement to cultural context and history. Rather than create a tabula rasa,
temporary experiments and urban plans can scaffold upon pre-existing local aesthetics, forms,
social practices, and rituals. The future is always in dialogue with the past and becomes more
powerful once properly tethered to context and communities. Nevertheless, new forms of
social relations and spatial activities can be introduced and tested to gage the value and
feasibility of futuristic visions. Moving into public space allows designs to become even more
tangible and offers the public a better glimpse into new horizons of potential futures.

3. Forming Communities and Collaborative Infrastructures

Participation is key for modeling pluralistic and democratic ideals into creative practices
and new urban forms. Sometimes democracy is messy and conflict driven, and thus results in
multiple proposals instead of one perfect consensus. Rather than privileging the visionary
position of experts or creatives, participatory processes offer insight into community desires
while empowering their sense of ownership over projects. The complicated task of creating
new worlds or envisioning new societies, should be as diverse as possible to not only gain new
insights but to better represent the makeup of that society. The introduction of new
technologies is historically uneven and have the potential to reinforce existing social and
economic hierarchies. The increasing proliferation of technology into all aspects of public life
thus demands an ever increasing engagement with everyday citizens and publics - across

320
cultural, ethnic, and generational lines.
The unique position of artists, designers, and mediamakers is their ability to use
aesthetic communication to uncover citizens’ latent desires and represent those visions to the
larger public. But this position requires more than temporary projects or short-term
ethnographies. Rather, it requires long-term engagement and infrastructuring to build social
relationships and systems for meaningful collaboration and self-expression. While we can
envision grand designs for the future, the actual process of creating futures is much more
complicated and must contend with diverse publics and communities, each containing their
own desires, issues, and concerns. Through participation and co-creation, we can come closer
to creating a pluralistic future that embodies the complexity of our societies.

C. Spreading Anticipatory Design

While I have mostly focused on my projects in Los Angeles, the ultimate goal of my
work is to scale out and create methods to be used across other urban environments and
communities. In the summer of 2017, Ben Cadwell, janet e. dandridge, François Bar, and I
went to Chicago to work with South Chicago residents and University of Chicago students. As
the new Obama presidential library/community center is planned to be constructed in South
Chicago in 2021, there was a mix feeling of hope and idealism with the fears of development
and gentrification among residents. Similar to our work in South LA, we ran an eight day
“Sankofa City Summer School” workshop to move from envisioning and brainstorming to
physical prototyping and exhibiting design fiction videos/urban models to the public.
Throughout the workshop series, there were also a number of guest speakers, in order
to expose participants to relevant ideas and highlight ongoing local work in African-American
art, Afrofuturism, and social justice. Speakers included local artist Theaster Gates, Afrofuturism

321
author Ytasha Womack, speculative designer Patrick Jagoda, and urban historian Adrienne
Brown. These speakers help ground our particular workshop series to local practices, histories,
and cultural insights.
In line with anticipatory design, the Chicago workshop series sought to include five
different elements. 1.) Long-term relations: working from initial speculative brainstorming to
longer collaborative timelines. Ben Caldwell and Raul “Retro” Poblano will go to Chicago again
in summer of 2018 to run another series of workshops. In addition, participants from last
summer’s workshops have continued to stay in touch as they try to realistically implement
ideas developed in the workshop series.
2.) Maximal participation: creating workshops and filmmaking sessions that develop
concepts and content directly from participants. During our Sankofa City project in South Los
Angeles, Ben Caldwell and I established the “what if” questions up front. In contrast, the
Chicago workshop series was more participatory. We created certain domains to focus on:
food, fashion, and transportation. However, the “what if” questions were developed by the
participants themselves through group discussion. In this sense then, our method is still
evolving and reflectively changing during each new iteration.
3.) Utopian politics: the workshop focused on spaces, systems, and relations in the
present that reveal utopic potentials for the future. There were moments in the workshop series
in which we explored local spaces and characters, derived from participant’s pleasurable
memories. The goal was to find the unique Chicago experiences or particular urban events
from the past and present in order to uncover potentials for the future. By uncovering the
utopic elements in the participants’ everyday life, the anticipatory design workshop series
meant to project such latent potentials into a fully thought out vision for the future.
4.) Aesthetics to inspire publics: as with all of our projects, design fiction films were
created to show an aesthetically rich and story-driven representation of design concepts. By

322
showcasing the participants, themselves as actors, the videos helped to ground their
experience and present their own affective investment. Through the videos, complex designs
(often beyond fabrication) were manifested and revealed in rich detail. Audiences were better
able to comprehend and collectively imagine how these socio-technological systems could
function.
5.) Balancing systems and people: in addition to the videos, large scale cardboard
urban models were shown. These models were created during the workshop series to
represent the top-down and spatial dimensions of the collective plans. In our survey with
participants, many highlighted this process as the most rewarding. Moreover, these models
helped provide a systemic perspective in comparison to the human-level representation in
most of the design fiction films.
Overall, the 8-day workshop followed a specific structure to balance top-down and
bottom-up design processes:

1. Day 1 Brainstorming: groups created speculative “what if” questions around key
domains: food, clothing, and transportation. Participants developed lists of
concepts and then collectively chose specific ideas to develop and sketch out
maps/schematics.
2. Day 2 Urban Design: groups explored the neighborhood, taking stock of key
institutions and social activities, such as a community garden and local parks for
barbecuing. Then groups collectively created four by six foot cardboard, clay,
and plastic models of their ideal neighborhood.
3. Day 3 Creating a Scene: groups ran through improvisational acting strategies to
create scenarios for characters to live inside their imagined neighborhood.
These characters were often inspired by their own experiences and people in

323
their lives.
4. Day 4 Prototyping: groups used props and recycled computer parts to develop
wearable and small-scale urban technologies. They then performed a scenario
that showcased their technology and built upon the previous week’s characters.
5. Day 5 Critique: groups presented their models and prototypes to a group of
local historians, artists, professors, and urban planners. They then incorporated
the feedback into their prototypes and reconceived their final scenarios.
6. Day 6-7 Filming and Editing: groups created one to three minute long design
fiction videos. These videos were a distillation of the personas and scenarios
that were developed throughout the previous days.
7. Day 8 Public Exhibition: groups presented their videos and urban models at a
local art gallery. By dialoguing with the larger public, groups were able to gain
important insight and learn which designs resonated most with local residents.

In the end, there were three group concepts: the Woodlawn 2037 group, the OG Smart
Garden group, and 63 and Woodlawn Theater. Each group presented distinct concepts, driven
by the unique assemblage of participants. The Woodlawn 2037 group envisioned
environmental computing systems that told stories of their location. Focusing on the aesthetic
experience, the group created a concept for a sidewalk that triggered local music (inspired by
Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean video). The music would represent a spectrum of music from jazz
to electronic house music. The group wanted to preserve and celebrate the rich musical history
of the area by giving visitors a unique audio-visual walking experience,
The OG Smart Garden group envisioned a local community garden that used bluetooth
to send dietary and culinary information about the individual produce in the garden. They also
envisioned a smart card (that can be worn around the neck) that contains basic health

324
information or can be used to make purchases. The card could be scanned into the garden
database to find foods that were most appropriate to maximize the users health.
The 63 and Woodlawn Theater group envisioned smart furniture placed around the
park, that would display holographic screens of the neighborhood’s rich history. In addition,
they envisioned a holographic host who would help guide the tour as a digital spirit of that
space. In addition, they created a novel approach to return some of the elements of the local
park to the original design of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. In the center of the park
are large, grassy runoff ditches that were originally created as canals to move through the park.
The group wanted to re-establish these as a unique experience that brought the past into the
future.
Since the initial workshop, one of the participants in the garden group has actually
received a loan and bought a piece of property in the neighborhood to turn it into a garden.
Coming into the workshop series, this participant stated that she was trying to figure out a
business plan. Through the process, she was able to collectively brainstorm and articulate an
(unexpected) plan to create a garden that both provides food as well as needed culinary and
spiritual advice. In this way, the group presented food access as not just pragmatic
sustenance, but a space for social gatherings and education.
This Chicago workshop series was really the first where I could test the “anticipatory
design” model and engage with a population less familiar with our previous work. We had
previously run one-day workshops (in Detroit and Copenhagen) centered around creating a
reappropriated payphone or urban game. By grounding the process in a particular locale in
Chicago, it was much easier to quickly brainstorm and add complex technological elements
atop the design process. Participants brought local knowledge, memories, and insights into
what the community would value with redesigning the area.

325
However, being in a new location also raised new questions beyond our
conceptualization. Throughout the entire process, especially during the initial “what if”
brainstorming, there were discussions of gun violence. While many US urban centers like New
York and Los Angeles have seen a steady decrease in violent grimes over the last 20-30 year
years, Chicago has seen an increase in violence. In 2017, there were 650 murders - often tied
to gun violence (Park, 2018). This issue brought about many discussions, different possible
solutions, and disagreements for urban design forms. For example, one group wanted to
create protective concrete walls around playgrounds, to keep children hidden. Yet other
groups argued that that defeated the purpose of creating open, public spaces and would rather
cause more danger by hiding the activities of the playgrounds from the community’s watch. In
the end, I do not think we fully tackled the issue of gun violence. On our part, this issue should
have been more intentionally built into the process. Perhaps it was beyond the scope of an
eight-day workshop series. More importantly, the issue speaks to the need to have more
community organizers who are knowledgeable of local actions and strategies for dealing with
gun violence and trauma. Such complex and devastating issues require local knowledge and
training beyond designers, but should nonetheless be addressed as part of the social fabric of
that area.
Now, as our team discuss workshops in other cities and countries (possibly South
Africa), we must research and dialogue with collaborators to create flexible workshop methods
that engage local identity and issues. Rather than begin imagining a future that is abstract and
decontextualized, anticipatory design should always start grounded in a local context. From
there, the flexible methods can serve as guiding tools - imaginative infrastructures - for
designing new potential futures. These methods and concepts can then continue to live with
the local representatives and collaborators to develop their own adapted variations.
Therefore, I would argue that infrastructuring for long-term relationships should actually

326
involve intercommunity and intercity collaboration. By traveling to new cities, we designers are
forced to grapple with new issues - and solutions - that continue to be part of the urban
experience. Research is necessary for each workshop series to fully engage with new urban
contexts; more importantly, assemblages of teams should represent the diverse local expertise
for addressing the intersecting and interdisciplinary issues of an area. Through exploring
multiple cities and cultures, a network of future-facing and community-driven practices can
develop shared strategies and methods. These nodes should of course retain their autonomy
and agonistic diversity in order to best represent each community’s fears and desires for the
future. By building atop pre-existing connections and self-organizing, a critical anticipatory
design network can help guide an emergent model of collective urban dreams.

D. Towards a Brighter Future

Ultimately, I think another world is possible. Utopia does not have to be a remote
location, but a systematized and imaginative practice for global change. At this point, utopian
thinking feels like a necessary tool for survival. Despite the ever growing global issues of
income inequality, overpopulation, and ecological crises, humans have the potential to redirect
their societies towards more sustainable and equitable paths. It is not an easy task. Yet, the
latent potential of billions of people, once engaged in both local and large scale constructivist
activities could change the world for the better. The future depends on creating methods and
infrastructures of radical participation that prefigure the types of pluralistic societies that could
exist in the future. Large scale change depends on public adoptions of new lifestyles and
technologies, tied to culturally specific histories and geographies. Once tested and
implemented, new unexpected and emergent behaviors will arise from the complex interaction
of human behaviors and productions of space. Our future depends on people.

327
I am not arguing to erase the expert. Ecologists, engineers, planners, physicists, etc. are
still important for their specialized knowledge of the physical world and the complex systems
that govern it. But the often invisible - and always unpredictable - social dimension of
developing urban and human-driven ecological systems depends upon a deeper and more
meaningful engagement with everyday people. Cities are created through everyday activities,
adaptive social practices, and cultural fusions. And it is here at the street level, at the core of
what makes us human, that art, media, and design have a unique role for expressing and
concretizing the invisible layer or subtext of dreams, fears, and desires. It is here, that I hope
infrastructures of the imagination can identify pre-existing practices that are reshaping our
world for the better; and that anticipatory design can create a nascent method for synthesizing
interdisciplinary practices and theories into a coherent tool for creating another world. The
smallest actions can change the world, but only if we are conscious of the scale and build
networks of people-driven infrastructures of the imagination.

328
References

Busch, C. (2018, February 16). How Black Panther has spurred community and activism across
the globe. Retrieved March 8, 2018, from http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/how-black-
panther-has-spurred-community-and-activism-across-the-globe
D’Alessandro, A. (2018, February 21). “Black Panther” Goes Wild: At $242M Superhero Owns
2nd Best 4-Day Opening & Defeats “Last Jedi” – Update. Retrieved March 8, 2018,
from http://deadline.com/2018/02/black-panther-thursday-night-preview-box-office-
1202291093/
Lockhart, P. R. (2018, February 21). Black Panther: activists are using film screenings to
register voters. Retrieved March 8, 2018, from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/2/21/17033644/black-panther-screenings-voter-registration-wakanda-
the-vote
Miller, M. J. (2018, February 27). Learning From Wakanda: Five Innovations to Afrofuturism for
Black Creators. Retrieved March 8, 2018, from https://medium.com/black-
urbanism/learning-from-wakanda-five-innovations-to-afrofuturism-for-black-creators-
3098b40889c0
Park, M. (2018, January 1). Chicago has fewer murders in 2017, but 650 killed. CNN. Retrieved
from https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/01/us/chicago-murders-2017-statistics/index.html
Setoodeh, R. (2018, February 5). Chadwick Boseman and Ryan Coogler on How “Black
Panther” Makes History. Retrieved March 8, 2018, from
http://variety.com/2018/film/features/black-panther-chadwick-boseman-ryan-coogler-
interview-1202686402/
Thompson-Hernández, W. (2018, February 12). “Black Panther” Cosplayers: “We”re Helping
People See Us as Heroes’. The New York Times. Retrieved from
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/admin/100000005728105.embedded.html?

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Asset Metadata

Creator Baumann, Karl Arthur (author)

Core Title Infrastructures of the imagination: building new worlds in media, art, & design

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)

Publication Date 08/05/2018

Defense Date 04/04/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,augmented reality,autonomous vehicles,community art,Design,design fiction,film,futures studies,Los Angeles history,media,OAI-PMH Harvest,participatory design,Science fiction,South Los Angeles,speculative design,tactical urbanism,urbanism,utopian studies,world building

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kratky, Andreas (committee chair), Bar, François (committee member), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email karlbaumann2008@gmail.com,kbaumann@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-52921

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