Multimedia documentation of unfolding process observed in nine speculative futures workshops
For the Emerge Symposium we crafted a mixed-method conversational framework that first explored the capture of methods both in terms of outcome and process. Through the gallery exhibition we explored the synthesis of these diverse documentary fragments to explanatory representation structures and participatory installations for diverse audiences. Leveraging insights from both of these efforts, we next explore the development of new channels to support, foster and encourage curation of and discourse around the methods and outcomes.
We have developed an online community-driven platform for the dissemination and discussion of process-centered representations of futurist methods in action. This online mediated environment serves diverse audiences and functionally integrates many facets of our documentation framework. Primarily the online platform provides opportunities for collaborative meaning making around the captured speculative content. There is much potential for foresight design activity documentation to facilitate in the examination of meta-process levels of design practice and variance in expertise. Our goal in developing this public platform is to provide a shared repository of content, with novel annotation and curation mechanisms to support the needs of diverse researchers, practitioners, educators and the general public in considering the future. This goal is facilitated in a number of ways.
The online platform can host a wide variety of media content (e.g. text, photos, diagrams, movies) depicting forecasting related activities. The content can be displayed and accessed conventionally according to media type, metadata, timeframe, etc. The content can also be collected into curated sets of related artifacts, organized for example by topic, activity or event. However, the power of the platform lies in its support for community driven representation, dynamic filtering and collaborative annotation. Community driven representation refers to the use of viewing statistics and social features (e.g. likes) to determine the inclusion and priority of media items on the home page and in recommendations. These representations can be filtered dynamically and refocused based on community contributed tags to create presentations that explore particular questions, events or even people. Finally, the platform supports collaborative annotation at multiple levels included media artifact, media collection or community discussion.
The platform currently hosts all of the Emerge documentation data, including content captured during the symposium and data contributed by visitors to the Emerge gallery exhibition. It is available at: http://vpl.design.cmu.edu:8080