Task 1: What’s in Your Bag?
For this assignment, I chose to photograph my purse and its contents. The items that I commonly carry with me are: AirPods, Invisaligns, hand sanitizer, lotion, Tylenol, Keys (house, car, mail, classroom), chapstick, pen, Essential Oil Roller, hair pins, corn nuts, fruit bar, Cards (credit, debit, ID, membership), and a coin purse. I also normally carry my phone, which I used to take the picture, and my planner, which I took out to use and left on my desk.
The items in my bag help me stay prepared and organized in my life as a mother to a 5-year-old boy and an elementary teacher. My keys allow me to move between my house, car, and classroom. My pen, planner, AirPods, and phone help me schedule, plan, and communicate. The corn nuts and fruit bar are in case my son is hungry while commuting to and from our school and home. The Invisaligns, hand sanitizer, lotion, Tylenol, essential oil roller, chapstick, and hair pins are self-care items, and my cards and coin purse are for purchases and identification.
The items in my bag can be considered texts because they represent my day-to-day life, from where I go to what I do. My keys, cards, and coin purse suggest that I occupy both professional and private spaces, particularly my home, car, school, and consumer spaces like the Aquarium, Starbucks, and VanDusen Gardens. I use my pen to transfer ideas from my head to my planner, and I use both to organize and plan my studies, work, and personal life. The snacks, Tylenol, lotion, Invisaligns, hand sanitizer, chapstick, hairpins, and essential oils reflect my and my son’s self-care and hygiene needs, as well as societal expectations and influences. Lastly, my phone and AirPods represent my need to stay informed and connected throughout the day. I heavily rely on these, along with my planner, to multitask and coordinate events in my day-to-day life.
My phone and AirPods are my primary means of communication, including messaging, email, apps, and online platforms and information. They also allow me to listen to music, audiobooks, and articles, and to communicate via calls, voice messages, and videos. Even though I primarily organize my life in my planner, I communicate and share information on my phone. Although the remainder of my items are not digital, they still utilize technology either in its production like my Invisaligns that were made with a 3D printer and the multilingual text printed on my items that communicate its contents, usage, and ingredients, or in its usage like my cards that are linked to member identification and digital banking systems and my car and building keys that contain microchips that communicate identification using radio frequencies. My mailbox, apartment, and classroom keys represent old technology as they are traditional metal keys that grant me access to those spaces.
The contents of my bag show that I am literate to a degree in many areas. My AirPods, phone, pen, and planner suggest that I am multimodal and able to read and write both digitally and on paper. My coin purse, keys, and various cards suggest financial and cultural literacy, as I have a home, a job, a car, and access to cultural spaces like the Art Gallery, the Symphony, and other local spaces. The remaining items, such as Tylenol, chapstick, hand sanitizer, and snacks, demonstrate my health literacy skills because they are essential to my care and well-being.
The image I would like to project is organized and composed, but the contents of my bag reveal that I require many self-care and organizational aids to achieve that image. My bag provides me with the tools that I need to multitask and manage my chaotic life as a Grad student, teacher, mother, friend, and family member while appearing calm and poised.
Fifteen or twenty-five years ago, my bag was much simpler. I had a small wristlet big enough for a thin flip phone, one key, my ID, and two bank cards. It would have reflected a time when I was younger, with fewer responsibilities and societal influences. My now larger bag reflects changes in technology, responsibilities, and expectations as I transitioned from being a student to a student who is also a teacher and single parent.
An archaeologist examining this bag might conclude that I am from the early twenty-first century based on the technology it contains. The mix of digital tools, a planner, and a pen may suggest that I am a multitasking individual who attempts to manage it with an abundance of self-care items.
Overall, the contents of my bag are indicative of who I am at the moment, and I am sure that my bag and its contents will continue to change over time, as they have from the wristlet I owned many years ago.
Task 2: Does Language Shape the Way We Think?
[1:55] Dr. Boroditsky states that languages differ in the things they require from their speaker in order to speak the language grammatically.
As a multilingual learner who speaks English, French, and Mandarin and is trying to teach my 5-year-old son those languages, I often find it difficult to explain various grammar rules to him. Like why objects in French start with ‘le’ or ‘la’ instead of ‘the’ or that in Mandarin, verbs are not conjugated because you use time words and aspect markers to differentiate when the action happened and the status of the action. When speaking in French, he often defaults to identifying items as multiples regardless of how many there are to avoid the gendered article and tries to combine Mandarin and English after I start to correct him when conjugating verbs in a sentence (ex: Can we (tomorrow in Mandarin) go to the park?).
[11:17] Dr. Boroditsky mentions that how we organize time is related to the language we read and write in.
This resonated with me because the way I write out chronological events or tasks depends on the space and format I am given, as well as the amount of information I know or need to include for each entry. If each entry is a single task, I will likely write the steps vertically, but if they are multi-stepped, I usually write the steps horizontally and then elaborate from top to bottom under each step. This may seem normal so far, but where my friends and colleagues start to question my organizational methods is the direction I take. If I know exactly what the end result is going to be, but not the tasks I need to get there, I put it at the top if I am writing vertically or on the right if I am writing horizontally. If I have a vague idea about the end result, I do the opposite. I have never understood why I did this, but watching this lecture made me wonder if it is because I grew up learning languages like English and French, which read from left to right, then up to down and Mandarin, which reads up to down, then right to left. I learned all three languages around the same time, so I wonder if my way of organizing tasks chronologically makes sense to me, because I can think and process information in different directions, and because language frames abstract ideas like time and organizes how we think about schedules (Boroditsky, 2011).
[23:35] Dr. Boroditsky discusses how people describe and perceive objects depending on the grammatical gender.
Dr. Boroditsky continues to explain that when children were asked to give objects voices, those who spoke languages with gendered nouns instinctively assigned the corresponding voices to those objects. In my experience teaching descriptive language and poetry, I have noticed the same thing. Bilingual students who speak a language with gendered nouns will associate that gender’s stereotypical features with the noun when describing it. Consequently, students who spoke only English or another language that does not gender nouns had difficulty describing non-gendered nouns and sometimes had difficulty understanding why certain students could do so with ease. Until now, I did not realize that the language these students spoke affected their ability to use descriptive language, but Boroditsky’s (2011) explanation that grammatical gender influences one’s perception definitely explains why I have taught students who were adamant that certain inanimate objects displayed certain traits and that students who had differing opinions were wrong.
[26:03] Dr. Boroditsky explains that language helps us construe and construct events
This resonated with me because I often have to explain imagery and descriptive language to students who are learning English as an additional language, as they often take the literal meaning of words in a sentence and become confused when reading a passage or a novel. I also find that students are able to explain and describe events and items differently depending on the language that they are using, the more familiar they are with the language, the more descriptive they are. In a different scenario, my son, as a young learner with limited language experience, tends to use English for simple statements with an adult he knows speaks the language or a family member, French for commands, and Irish for counting. Boroditsky (2011) describes this as cognitive flexibility, where bilingualism allows for multiple ways of thinking, and it has led me to use French to let my son know when he stops responding to or pushes the limits of instructions said in English. He is now, for better or worse, associating French instructions with immediate action, which comes in handy at social events and in emergencies.
[32:05] Dr. Boroditsky asks how we know that language is causal and explains that speakers of different languages witness the same event, but remember different things about it.
This is important to me because it made me rethink how my child, as an only child, retold events that happened where something was damaged. I used to think that he never assigned blame because there were usually only two of us, but even after attending daycare and Kindergarten, he continues to recall incidents and accidents in a more neutral construct and often has difficulty recalling who did what when an adult is trying to assess the situation after the fact. This relates to how Boroditsky (2011) explains how language can shape social and emotional understanding through memory and responsibility.
[43:55] Dr. Boroditsky reminds us that while we are capable of seeing the world in many different ways, we do not often think to look because once we start to think one way, we do not tend to look for another perspective.
As a multilingual learner and teacher, this resonated with me, especially now that I work in an inquiry-based school where projects across many subjects are inquiry-based. Usually, due to time constraints, once my colleagues and I come up with a project that suits our age group and topic, we do not change it year to year or rethink its components unless we encounter aspects that no longer work or do not work with our current group of students. Years ago, I was introduced to a method of teaching French through storytelling and fell in love with it. I have taught French using that method until this year, when I find myself teaching the same cohort for a third year in a row. This cohort was no longer as engaged as they used to be and were becoming difficult to manage as the lessons were predictable to them and less of a novelty. In addition to the unique situation of having me as their French teacher for a third year in elementary, it became clear that I needed to pivot my lessons and switch things up. Moving forward, I will try to reassess projects and modes of delivery yearly to see if I can improve them, rather than waiting until the current option fails. As Boroditsky (2011) states, in addition to being an extra communication tool, bilingualism provides cognitive flexibility.
Task 4: Potato Printing
For this project, I chose the word Grace because it is my mom’s name. The most challenging part of the process was being patient while remembering the steps and entertaining my son (you can see from the crayon marks where he tried to ‘help’). Having made potato stamps before, I started out confident that I could write the letters out and replicate them with ease, and use a needle for precision. I began by cutting the potato widthwise out of habit, but I could not write small enough to fit the letters in and still be able to cut them. Switching to lengthwise solved that problem, and I dried the surface so I could write on it. I started cutting it out, but when my son peered over and could read the letters, I realized I had forgotten to carve it backwards, as shown in Cooke’s (2012) video. After a break, I regrouped and finally finished both stamps. The process took about 4 hours because the needling takes a long time. The A and R were a bit difficult because of the gap that had to be scooped out, so you will notice a cut through the A on one of the stamps. The E was surprisingly challenging as I broke off more than I intended with the second one, so I had to go back and alter the first. I have always been fascinated by the printing press, and this experience has made it very clear how difficult it is to reproduce letters and that consistency requires precision and patience. I gained a deeper appreciation for the instant reproduction of text and will think twice before getting mad at the school printer for breaking, because I could be doing it by hand or having to put all the letters in backwards to copy it. Overall, I am happy with my results. Having previously made potato stamps gave me a few tips before I began, and a connection to the word definitely kept me committed to it and doing well.
References:
Danny Cooke Freelance Filmmaker. (2012, January 26). Upside down, left to right: A letterpress film [Video]. YouTube.
Task 6: An Emoji Story
Reflection:
Translating the title and plot of the last movie I watched into emojis required me to rely heavily on ideas and visual representations rather than syllables and individual words. Kress (2005) emphasizes that the shift from traditional text representation to multimodal forms, such as emojis, creates opportunities for interpretation and audience-driven meaning. With this in mind, I scanned the available emojis for recognizable images and symbols, such as the ocean, a sailboat, and a girl with curly hair, to represent key characters and moments in the narrative.
Since we had the option to choose between a movie, a show, or a book, I started with the last book I read, Wicked. The title was easy for me to represent, but the plot was difficult because many of the symbols I was looking for did not exist. I then switched to the last show I watched, Bridgerton, and found the opposite problem. The plot was easy to represent, but I could not find emojis to represent the title by syllables, words, or symbols. I decided to go with the last movie I watched, and it was easy for me to represent the title. The plot, however, took longer because I could not find some of the images I was looking for. Bolter (2001) explains that meaning is reorganized spatially rather than linearly, so I arranged the emojis with arrows to represent progression, allowing the reader to understand the development visually while uniquely using emojis and avoiding a long string of emojis that sometimes repeat. It would have been much easier if the assignment had not specified that we had to use emojis available on our mobile or desktop, because I could have created custom emojis through the new Genmoji feature on my phone.
This task reminded me of Kress’ (2005) “gains and losses” concept, where the gain is the immediate imagery recognition and the loss is the precision of the narrative, as using only emojis requires interpretation from the reader, which may differ from the author. The process not only required finding the appropriate symbols but also learning to speak digitally by arranging them in a way that allows readers to understand the story’s flow and key concepts (Hayles, 2003).
References:
Chapter 4. Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hayles, K. (2003). Deeper into the machine: The future of electronic literature. Culture Machine, 5.
Kress, G. (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 2(1), 5-22.
Task 7: Mode-bending
This week’s task explored multiliteracies and shifting the semiotic mode of the first task. For the original “What’s in your bag?” assignment, I simply took a photo of my purse and its contents: AirPods, Invisaligns, hand sanitizer, lotion, Tylenol, Keys (house, car, mail, classroom), chapstick, pen, Essential Oil Roller, hair pins, corn nuts, fruit bar, Cards (credit, debit, ID, membership), and a coin purse. The image functioned as a visual documentation of what I typically carry in my purse, but did not explain the why.
To change the mode, I redesigned the task as a stop-motion animation where each item “speaks” as it exits my purse, narrating a moment when it’s needed. This redesign reflects the New London Group’s (1996) notion where meaning is actively created through multiple modes. The benefit is that it shifts a simple, perhaps boring, photograph to an animated narrative that transforms the inventory of my purse into a story about preparedness, stress management, self care, and motherhood (Peña & James, 2024). While planning the order of the items and their dialogue, Leander & Boldt’s argument about literacy being more than just textual and Cope & Kalantzis’ (2009) reminder that multiliteracies increases engagement and awareness challenged me to think more like a designer and director rather than a student completing a task. Although challenging, I was thankful that my experience working with digital tools and in theatre came in handy as I planned, scripted, and executed my vision. The only thing that I did not account for was the speed of each frame, so the text is difficult to read as it is too fast, so I have included the script below. The animation captures a day in the life of me as I navigate my personal, academic, and professional life. Redesigning the first task showed me that literacy is no longer just print, but encompasses all modes as the New London Group (1996) envisioned when they introduced multiliteracies three decades ago.
Script:
Keys: “Before you shut that door, do you have me? Because you can’t lock the door or get to the car without me.”
Pen: “A teacher just asked you to send a document, the office just relayed a message for a student once they arrive. Use me to write it down, so you don’t forget.”
AirPods: “Need to prep for the day while you’re in that meeting? I’ll keep your hands free.”
Sanitizer: “A student just sneezed while handing in an assignment. Use me to get rid of those germs!”
Tylenol: “Is that fluorescent lighting? Or twenty-seven simultaneous questions about fractions? Either way, I’m your quiet assistant.”
Saje Roller: “Before your lunchtime meeting, take ten seconds. Roll. Breathe. Reset.”
Chapstick: “You’ve been talking nonstop for four hours. Let me help.”
Hair pins: “Need to teach PE outside? Don’t worry, I’ll secure your hair.”
Fruit Bar: “Mommy, I’m hungry. Can I have a snack? Fruit bar to the rescue!”
Membership card: “Off to the aquarium? Don’t forget me!”
Coin purse: “I’m getting heavy…If you need to pay for the meter, use me instead of the app.”
Corn Nuts: “Mommy, can we share some corn nuts while we watch the sea otters?”
Invisaligns: “Finished with that snack? Time to pop us back in. Self-care is commitment.”
Lotion: “You’ve washed your hands at least twenty times today. Take care of them.”
Bag: “As long as you remember to bring me with us, I’ll have everything you need to get you through your day.”
References:
Peña, E., & James, K. (2024). A framework of transmediation. Convergence, 30(5), 1610-1624. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231220325
Leander, K., & Boldt, G. (2013). Rereading “a pedagogy of multiliteracies”: Bodies, texts, and emergence.Links to an external site. Journal of Literacy Research, 45(1), 22-46.
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). Multiliteracies: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164-195.
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. (Links to an external site.) Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.
Task 8: Golden Record Curation
- Bach- Brandenburg No. 2
- Robert Brown- Kinds of Flowers
- Mozart- Queen of the Night Aria
- Sandra LeBrun Holmes- Morning Star and Devil Bird
- Stravinsky- Sacrificial Dance
- Louis Armstrong- Melancholy Blues
- Charles Duvelle- Percussion
- Casa de la Cultura- Panpipes and Drum
- Beethoven- 5th Symphony
- Goro Yamaguchi- Tsuru No Sugomori
The original 27 selections were curated to represent the “diversity of life and culture on Earth”, so I decided to prioritize culture and history when reducing the tracks to 10 (NASA, n.d.). Rumsey (1999) argues that preservation is selective by nature and can shape cultural memory, so I tried to choose works that represented the birth of music and different cultures. My background in music did present a bias when finalizing the list, as I chose to keep the traditional classical pieces even though many of the composers are from Germany, making my list less culturally diverse. With that being said, I believe the reduced list of 10 preserves the original intent and represents music that has influenced me.
References:
Music from Earth. (n.d.). NASA.
Smith Rumsey, A. (1999, February). Why digitize? Council on Library and Information Resources.
Task 9: Network Assignment
Upon completing Task 8, we were asked to take a quiz in which we selected the Golden Record. For this task, we were asked to upload a network database generated from the quiz in Palladio, an interactive visualization tool and analyze it. At first glance (Figure 1), the visual created was both fascinating, as it showed how interconnected our selections were, and confusing, as the text and nodes were closely spaced together.
After watching several tutorials and playing around with the data, I decided to start with a visualization of the chosen tracks and how many curators selected them (Figure 2). I could see that the songs with many edges connecting them were the most selected and had larger nodes, like Track 24, and the songs with fewer edges connecting them were not selected as much and had smaller nodes, like Track 10. As there appeared to be many tracks visually represented, I looked more closely at the Label_2 Facet and noticed that there were no null choices from our data, as all tracks were selected at least twice, and the majority of tracks were selected by at least a quarter of the curators. Had there been null choices, they would not have appeared in the visualization and without knowing the reasons behind each selection, I could only speculate as to why they were omitted or why we as a class did not omit any songs.
For the second visualization (Figure 3), I chose to display data from my community, showing who had selected songs from my list of 10 tracks, and I rearranged it for better visual clarity. I was interested to see that there was a high degree of connectivity, as 14 of the other 18 people chose at least 2 of the same songs I did, with one person choosing 8 of the same songs.
I was then interested in what people in my community chose as their other songs, so that brings us to my third visualization (Figure 4). It was surprising to see that only Track 8 from Papua New Guinea was omitted.
For my last visualization, I hoped to explore gender-based data to see whether they were similar, but when I checked their Canva profiles and student blogs, not everyone disclosed their preferences. So, rather than guessing someone’s gender based on their photo or name, I decided to look at a different visualization of all selected tracks compared to the first (Figure 5). I chose to rearrange the data to show curators and left my selections on one side so I could still identify my community while seeing all the other tracks and the rest of the curators in the same visualization. At the end of the day, the data cannot show why we share preferences or how our responses are so deeply connected, aside from us selecting the same track. While the visualization shows patterns, communities, and degrees of connectivity, it lacks context like demographics, prior exposure, social influences, biases, education, personal preferences, or random selection. The other piece I would find interesting, but would highly complicate the visual, is how each piece was ranked by the curators.
This exercise helped me visualize and understand how graph theory can help us understand the structure of search engines and the algorithm it applies to our searches, like spider and page rank, which could magnify dominant biases and perspectives when users search for a topic and dismiss the less represented point of view or opinion (Code.org, 2017). While there are limitations of representation, the visualization that Palladio provided was still powerful in terms of the patterns it revealed and the relationship between our classes’ selections.
References:
Code.org. (2017, June 13). The Internet: How search works! [Video]. YouTube
Task 10: Attention Economy
For this task, we needed to work our way through a digital game called User Inyerface, a graphical user interface that is “a challenging exploration of user interactions and design patterns (Bagaar, 2019). Since the game played on the word “interface” to communicate a phrase, “in your face”, commonly used towards an opponent who lost, and the module this week talked the rise of social media where we listened to Harris (2017) and Tufekci (2017) caution us about its ethical and social consequences of targeted advertising and its effectiveness, I started the game on edge. I immediately noticed (in Figure 1) the large “NO” in the middle of a green button that would normally say something like “GO” or “START,” and my competitive nature came out, and I knew the rest of the game was going to be similar to those viral mind-bending games that were popular in the early 2000s. The game my friends and I challenged each other with was called Brain Test, and my two other favourites when I got older were Monument, for its graphics, and The Witness, for its obscurity and interconnecting puzzles.
I was fully engaged and enjoyed this task largely due to my competitive nature and love of puzzles, but I still found it highly frustrating because it employed tactics I had not seen before, such as pop-ups and data deletion. The dark patterns I was used from from playing other games were the misleading visual cues like colours (green or red), words (yes/no or cancel/next), disguised/confusing navigation (here or close buttons) used atypically, and the illogical data entry (options are not chronological (birthday dropdown) or excessive/tedious (age slider going up to 200) that were all used to manipulate user decision (Brignull, 2010). What was new to me were the frequent urgency inducing interruptions created by the pop-ups and help box that seemed to appear and expand randomly which frustrated me, but was also a great example of what Harris (2017) calls “race for attention” as it both kept my attention and focus to completing the game and made me want to send and share it with a friend upon completion. It is clear that Baggar used algorithms to manage user attention effectively, keeping me engaged and annoyed or pressured just enough to want to figure out how to complete the task (Tufekci, 2017). Upon completion, User Inyerface effectively demonstrated how dark patterns could be used by corporations and individuals to manipulate user behaviour, hide information, and benefit from user error. Therefore, it is important that users become more critically aware of the power of influence and dark patterns and Tufekci (2017) and Harris (2017) stress the need to use our attention to collectively coordinate and restructure how our digital technology operates to be more ethical by being more transparent to both support human goals and be constrained by human values.
References:
Bagaar. (2019). User Inyerface [webgame]. https://userinyerface.com/
Brignull, H. (2011). Dark patterns: Deception vs. honesty in UI design. A List Apart, 338.
Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day [Video]. TED.
Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. [Video]. TED.
Task 11: Detain Release
I was a judge in Cherwell County for this week’s simulation activity and was tasked with deciding whether a defendant would be detained or released while awaiting trial. When I first read the assignment, I was excited to start the simulation because I love watching mysteries, forensic crime shows, and solving puzzles. Upon entering the simulation and reading the rules stating that I was the sole decision-maker and to keep an eye on jail capacity and public opinion, I started to feel pressure before I even clicked start. What if I detain too many people, or the public feels unsafe? What if the assessment was not enough?
Once I started the simulation, my reliance on the provided risk scores and systemic constraints, without knowing much about either, reminded me of O’Neil’s (2016) argument that algorithms can become “weapons of math destruction” when they are unregulated and trusted regardless of biases. While I had questions about the assessment, like what was considered low, medium, and high, I never questioned how the risk scores were generated, which reflects modern-day concerns about algorithmic transparency and accountability. The Reply All podcasts #127 and #128 further explain how predictive policing systems can reinforce existing inequalities, as they often use historical crime data that may include biased policing practices (Vogt, 2018).
After releasing one of the defendants, I received an alert (Figure1) that a man had failed to show up for a court hearing and was now at large. This raised the stakes for me, and I decided to focus more on public safety and the prosecution’s recommendation, as I did not want to release another defendant who might reoffend, even though they had not yet been convicted (Mars, 2017). The fictional pressure to potentially increase the public’s fear level and the desire to avoid it at all costs suggest that algorithmic systems do not always promote fairness.
This week’s readings helped me understand what an algorithm is and helped me see that these tools are not as neutral as they may seem. Artificial Intelligence can magnify existing political structures and biases, and when misused or misunderstood, can have dire consequences, like the Enron email scandal discussed in Herman’s (2019) podcast.
While algorithms can provide valuable insights, the people using them still need to be held accountable by using their own judgment when applying them and doing so ethically. The detain/release simulation reminded me of how easy it was to defer my decisions to whatever the algorithm said when pressured, instead of questioning it and using my own judgment to analyze all the information that was available.
References:
Herman, C. (Host). (2019, June 5). You’ve got Enron mail! (no. 35). [Audio podcast episode]. In Brought to You By. Business Insider.
Mars, R. (Host). (2017, September 5). The Age of the Algorithm (no. 274). [Audio podcast episode]. In 99 Percent Invisible.
Talks at Google. (2016, November 2). Weapons of Math Destruction | Cathy O’Neil | Talks at Google. [Video]. YouTube.
Vogt, P. (2018, October 12a). The Crime Machine, Part I (no. 127) [Audio podcast episode]. In Reply All. Gimlet Media.
Vogt, P. (2018, October 12b). The Crime Machine, Part II (no. 128) [Audio podcast episode]. In Reply All. Gimlet Media.
Task 12: Speculative Futures
Speculative Narrative:
The VanCity Zoo is finally opening for the first time since 2026! It has been 100 years since its doors closed, and our school gets to be the first through the gate. We are very curious to see what they will have on display.
Next day…
Walking off the bus this morning and through the front gates of VanCity Zoo, I started to feel uneasy. When I was researching zoos before the trip, I saw so many articles and videos about how happy they can be, with animals everywhere and laughter echoing through the paths. When I walk in, there are no animal sounds, no voices, nothing. The air smells damp, like rust and wet leaves, and the ground beneath my feet is cracked and uneven, with weeds pushing through the pavement.
As I move further into the zoo, I begin to notice something even worse. I am completely alone.
I continue down the path, searching for anyone who can help me find my group. As I walk, I begin to hear a ticking sound coming from behind a tree.
“Hello? Is anyone there?”No response.
Before I reach the tree, something flickers from the corner of my eye. Its stripes are shiny, like light bending through glass. It doesn’t move or breathe. Its eyes are glossy and unfocused. Then, suddenly, its body distorts and reforms. A hologram. I take a cautious step closer to read the sign: Bengal Tiger: Extinct, 2093.
Further along, I spot more figures in the enclosures. A herd of elephants, but their legs jerk stiffly, their trunks moving in slow, mechanical arcs. One lets out a sound, but it’s warped, looping unnaturally. Animatronics. Old ones. Broken ones. It’s like the entire place is trying to recreate something that no longer exists and failing.
The ticking sound grows louder.
I tear my eyes away from the ghostly animals and force myself toward the tree.
“Hello? Anyone there?”
No response.
I take a deep breath and look behind the tree. A clock?
I step closer, and I freeze in place. I look up from the base of the clock. The wood is old and splintered. As I reach the clock face, the clock clicks to 12:00 p.m. My eyes widen, and I gasp.
Reflection:
For this week’s task, we were given the option to use prompts similar to Thing from the Future or Creative Futures, a tool created by Dr. Horst and develop a scenario. I started with the prompts provided in a Google Sheet, but I felt like I needed a little more inspiration than the prompts were providing, so I went to Creative Features. After answering a few questions, I was dealt the following information: you are an ambivalent bystander, the future is… a moment of your choosing, you are… at the zoo, you are feeling… uneasy, you focus your attention upon… a clock.
The above scenario takes inspiration from Dunne and Raby’s (2013) notion that speculative design offers new perspectives rather than providing solutions. In my scenario, the extinct animals in the reopened zoo are represented through technologies, and I am unable to comprehend what I am seeing or how to respond. The reopened zoo is not a restored space, but a space that evokes tension and uneasiness, much like Orange’s thoughts about reopenings. After reading Mitrovic’s (2021) chapter 3, I decided to end my scenario without finishing my thought, as he states that speculative design should expand imagination and invite future scenarios and dialogue.
Using Dr. Horst’s Creative Futures as a prompt really inspired me and showed me how entertaining creating a speculative scenario could be.
References:
Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. The MIT Press.
Ford, A. C. (Host). (2020, September 2). Tommy Orange: Reopening. The Chronicles of Now [Audio podcast episode]. Pushkin Industries.
Mitrovic, I., Auger, J., Hanna, J., & Helgason, I. (Eds.). (2021). Beyond speculative design: Past – present – future. SpeculativeEdu.