Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • contract/bridge: Auger (2013), Speculative design: crafting the speculation

    Auger, J. (2013). Speculative design: crafting the speculation. Digital Creativity, 24(1), 11-35. This justly well-cited paper is in some respects a tour through the work of Auger and others (mostly RCA-aligned, I think?) in the decade prior to its publication in 2013. My purpose in writing it up is to extract and summarise the methodological…

  • being quite serious, the future may be boring

    Offered without comment, but with the contextualising note that the interview took place in 1984, some thoughts from J G Ballard on what we might now identify as the formation of European post-Fordist neoliberalism: The young people of Western Europe since the sixties have grown up in a remarkably uniform environment, both in terms of…

  • there is no transition

    Maybe I’m being over-optimistic, but seeing arguments for non-solutionist and demand-side approaches to decarbonisation research appearing in a journal from the Nature stable feels like a sign that the idea is getting some traction at long last. That said paper is by Elizabeth Shove, a brilliant and tenacious researcher whose work has been a huge…

  • partially-automated bi-utopian communism

    I’ve been quietly impressed by the ubiquity of Aaron Benanav across a variety of venues as he promotes his recently-published book Automation and the Future of Work, of which I received a copy a while back. Benanav’s been a guest on blogs and podcasts aplenty, and I’m glad to have read and listened to some…

  • the ubiquitous fictionality of narratives of futurity

    Doing that thing where one quotes a famous and respected person saying things one has been saying for years, in the hope that it’ll be more palatable coming from someone famous and respectable. Once again, it’s yer man KSR, of course: All attempts to speak of the future are science fiction stories, and thus bound…