Check out Chris’ Task 12 here.

Chris created a situation based off of the following prompt: Describe or narrate a scenario about a pill found a few years into a future in which society as we know it has come apart. Your description should address issues related to the government and elicit feelings of disgust.

He presented his story using the H5P slideshow tool and embedding it into his post, describing the situation with accompanying pictures. It is a short, but interesting read.

I chose to link Chris’s task because of how similar his approach was to mine in this assignment. Both of our descriptions could be considered to be further out in the realm of possibility, rather than the more likely probable or plausible futures according to The Cone coined by Joseph Voros in 2003: 

The Cone. From Speculative Design and a Cone of Possibilities | Delve

Chris attributed his collapse of society to climate change and government inaction, and I attributed my collapse of society to the COVID pandemic resurging and harmful government action- yet, my prompt had no mention of the government but environment (Describe or narrate a scenario about an advertisement found a few years into a future in which society as we know it has come apart. Your description should address issues related to environment and elicit feelings of cheer), and vice-versa for Chris (Describe or narrate a scenario about a pill found a few years into a future in which society as we know it has come apart. Your description should address issues related to the government and elicit feelings of disgust.)

As for our object, we created things that honestly don’t seem too far-fetched in terms of realism, and both could be seen as “band-aid” solutions to the issues stated in our situations (Chris explicitly mentions this in his post, and in case you didn’t read mine, or you read it and didn’t understand what the object did, it essentially killed the person who put the VR headset on- a device created by the government to secretly commit genocide). 

Overall, I think both speculative futures are well thought up, scary, and hopefully will never come to fruition. Here’s to pushing our trajectory towards the preferred futures!