A ‘speculative pasts’ pedagogy: where speculative design meets historical thinking

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a pedagogic context for the authors’ concept of ‘Speculative Pasts,’ framed within an auto-ethnographic account of their co-taught course ‘How the Computer Became Personal.’ Blending disciplinary methodologies from historical practice and speculative and critical design, the Speculative Pasts assignment asks students to create primary documents from a hypothetical historical scenario related to an aspect of American personal computing history. This paper lays out the disciplinary contexts and development process for working across design and history disciplines, curricular organization, assignment process, and offers analysis of examples from student work. Additionally, this paper details how ‘Speculative Pasts’ offer a critique of the narrowness and problematic futurism of ‘speculative futures.’ Altogether, the authors offer this course and its primary project as a model for making history essential, rather than supplementary, to design and for leveraging practice-based production as a valued mode of historical inquiry.

KEYWORDS:

• Speculative design
• computer history
• historical methods
• pedagogy
• design education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Laine Nooney is an Assistant Professor of Media and Information Industries in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research focuses on the cultural and economic histories of the personal computing and video game industries. www.lainenooney.com, @sierra_offline

Tega Brain is an Assistant Industry Professor in the Programme in Integrated Digital Media in the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society at New York University. She is an artist and environmental engineer whose work intersects art, ecology, and engineering, taking the form of dysfunctional devices, eccentric infrastructures, and experimental information systems. http://tegabrain.com/, @tegabrain

Notes

1 For examples of popular writing and initiatives on digital literacy, youth, and education, see: DQ Institute: Leading Digital Education, Culture, and Innovation. Accessed July 13, 2019. https://www.dqinstitute.org/; Oliver Joy (2012); Miltner (2018).

2 Just a few examples of the varied digital humanities, critical making, and media archaeology labs include the Electronic Textual Culture Lab at the University of Victoria, https://etcl.uvic.ca/; the Critical Making Lab at the University of Toronto, https://criticalmaking.com/; the Tactile and Tactical Design Lab at the University of Washington, https://depts.washington.edu/tatlab/; the Digital Humanities Lab at Georgia Tech, https://dhlab.lmc.gatech.edu/; the Media Archaeology Lab at University of Colorado, Boulder, https://mediaarchaeologylab.com/; BookLab and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, at the University of Maryland, http://www.english.umd.edu/BookLab; Immersive Reality Lab for the Humanities at Amherst College. Perhaps the most prominent example of a specific project operating at the creative intersection of history and design can be found in the Making Core Memory project, a hands-on workshop and ‘design inquiry into the invisible work that went into assembling core memory, an early form of computer information storage initially woven by hand.’ By guiding participants as they build contemporary recreations of core memory, project leaders encourage reflection on the embodied knowledge involved in producing core memory, as well as on the ways historical frameworks typically exclude forms of labour done by women. See Rosner et al. (2018). In a recent publication called Stitching Worlds, Ebru Kurbak also describes a technique for speculating backwards, into the past in order to travel to a different place in the present. Reflecting on her extensive work creating computational technologies with textiles and embroidery with collaborator Irene Porsche, she also extends Dunne and Raby's speculative design approach. See Ebru Kurbak (2018).

3 Digital documentation of our most recent course structure, with citations for readings, can be found at: https://tegacodes.github.io/Histories-of-Computing/

4 Taeyoon Choi and E Roon Kang. Ramsey Nasser, قلب. Accessed September 5, http://nas.sr/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8/. Irene Porsche and Ebru Kurbak (2018).

5 A PDF of our most recent syllabus can be found at https://tegacodes.github.io/Histories-of-Computing/Syllabus_History-Computing.pdf

6 Glenn (2009), Chapter 6. A version of Glenn’s ‘Futures Wheel’ can be found in Extrapolation Factory’s Operator’s Manual: https://extrapolationfactory.com/.