Game Studies Stuff

A new study released by the Entertainment Software Association has revealed that adult women now occupy the largest demographic in the gaming industry. Women over 18 made up a whopping 36 percent of the gaming population, followed by adult men at 35 percent.

Where are the systems thinkers from games? Where are the gamers using their game knowledge to solve hunger? Where are those Lydian dice players willing to lead us to a new land to settle? We hear that games teach systems thinking, but yet “gamers” by and large exhibit close-minded and non-lateral characteristics in their thoughts, actions, and words. Why haven’t games brought us to a new understanding of our networked world?

Bloomberg’s American Mall [Bloomberg] is a retro browser game that invites you to simulate trying to revitalize a crumbling shopping mall, taking on the persona of one of four foolish investors who then has to decide whether to give breaks to your struggling retailers, bribe politicians by contributing to their re-election campaigns, chase out rats and punk teenagers, and try various gambits to tempt customers to come to your retail temple. (via 4 Short Links)

CW: discussion of mass incarceration and abuse.

“To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to be conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do we encounter the phrase “crime and punishment”? To what extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase “crime and punishment” in literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and documentary, and in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to think about punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, necessary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about the viability of the prison today?”

                                         –Angela Davis

In Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Angela Davis traces the brief history and rapid expansion of the American prison system, which was initially endorsed by groups such as the Quakers as a progressive alternative to corporal and capital punishment. The innovation of the prison, or the penitentiary, was that it made detainment the punishment itself, rather than the period in which those convicted of crimes would wait to be punished. As industrial capitalism developed, prison sentences, doled out in units of time, would mirror the labor time contained in the commodity form. Now we use the terms “jail” and “prison” to help distinguish between short term or pre-trial detention and long term incarceration. The stated mission of the penitentiary would be rehabilitation, an idea grounded in Enlightenment-era Protestant ideologies of work ethic, isolated reflection, and individualist self-actualization. Solitary confinement, now widely and rightly considered a form of torture, was originally conceived of as a kind of monastic occasion for transformative penance. Prisoners would be confined and monitored as they considered their crimes in a quiet exile that would ostensibly lead to a reformation of the soul.

Davis observes that the prison became the main form of state-sponsored punishment because of economic conditions that allowed for the establishment of the bourgeoisie social class, and intellectual conditions that popularized the idea of inalienable individual rights. Without the concept of individual rights, the state’s removal of these rights could not have been understood as punishment. This is why slaves and even white women were generally not imprisoned in the emerging penitentiary system. Imprisoning them would not have made sense because they were not afforded the individual rights of white men. When slavery was legally abolished in the South, the southern white underclass became less threatening to the social order, and freedmen and women replaced poor whites as the primary targets for incarceration. During slavery, most people incarcerated in the American South were white. Soon after slavery was legally abolished, the majority of southern prisoners were black. The criminal justice system, essentially a tool for monitoring and suppressing the lower class under the auspices of crime and punishment, enabled white southerners to continue to perceive black people as slaves. Initially, the newly criminalized and no longer legally enslaved were contracted out in a convict lease system to work in coal and iron mines in Alabama, on roads in Georgia, and even on some of the same southern plantations where slavery had just been abolished. The convict lease system provided a free labor pool for the development of industrial capitalism in the American South. Once the convict lease system was abolished, prisoners were for the most part confined exclusively to the penitentiary, which would continue to prove a valuable source of profit. The implied ideal image of the prison as vessel for rehabilitation was still there, as it always had been, but now this image would be used to help legally justify the criminalization of blackness.

Any serious study of history reveals that the modern American prison system is a relic and continuation of slavery, maintained in the interest of capital. As Davis points out, “The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.” While the stated goal of the prison is restorative, its fundamental purpose and outcome is punitive. For Davis, this contradiction suggests that prisons are obsolete, and therefore our goal should be abolition, not reform. And ultimately, when we talk about “reforming” prisons, we talk about improvements that should be made to all of society: better food, education, healthcare, and overall living conditions. Whenever we talk about these “reforms,” we are actually talking about what should be alternative institutions to the prison system itself, or institutions which, fully supported, would render prisons obsolete.   

In 2012, just a little under a decade after Are Prisons Obsolete? was first published, three men from the U.K. released a videogame called Prison Architect, a game about building and managing a private prison. The game was crowdfunded, with access to the alpha as a reward for pre-ordering the game. This means that it was essentially developed and tweaked publicly, as a response to feedback from its audience. Prison Architect has been widely successful by all measures. It sold over a million copies and made over ten million dollars in pre-order sales before its release was even made official on October 6, 2015. As of September 2015, the game had grossed over $19 million in sales. Prison Architect was entered in the Independent Games Festival, and it won a BAFTA award. Versions have been released for Xbox One and Playstation 4.

Prison Architect, commercially successful and widely discussed, is a useful illustration of how our myopic focus on prison reform allows the penitentiary to remain an immovable fixture of our collective social consciousness. In IGN’s review of the game, Richard Cobbett called it “one of the most in-depth, satisfying builder games in a long time,” and said “few other games have done such a good job at capturing not just the nature of the job they simulate, but also the mindset required to do it ‘properly’.” A piece that I still think about years after I first read it is Paolo Pedercini’s critique, published in Kotaku in 2014. Pedercini’s critique of Prison Architect is rigorous, but also generous. He concedes that many of the game’s treatments of what appears to be an American penitentiary, such as the ratio of violent to nonviolent offenders, could be improved with some thoughtful changes to the game’s mechanics and presentation. He offers helpful suggestions, but identifies no fundamental flaws in the game’s premise or subject matter.

The developers of Prison Architect posted a video response to Pedercini’s critique that is about thirty minutes long. In some ways their response is thoughtful. They at least acknowledge that prisons are a serious subject, not to be trifled with. They make it clear that they had hoped to avoid making a shallow or trivial game about prisons. But in watching their response, I felt an unsettling sense that they were selectively compiling useful feedback that would help them make a better prison game, as if it were simply a question of smoothing out bugs. It seemed as if the game’s fundamental premise and purpose remained uninterrogated by its creators. They talk a lot about their intentions: We never intended to set the game in America. We never intended for riots to be so frequent and bloody. We haven’t had time to balance the game yet. While the developers acknowledge that the image, or “myth,” of the American prison is so pervasive in global media as to be unavoidable, they also rebuff Pedercini’s assertion that they set the game in the United States, rather than deal directly with the implications of unintentionally or uncritically regurgitating this image. This is especially puzzling, considering the current promotional material for the game promises an opportunity to build a maximum security, or “supermax,” facility, a horrid invention which the United States has been instrumental in developing. Drawing from the realities of the American criminal justice system, Pedercini suggests in his piece that players could be given the option to lobby politicians to introduce legislation favoring their prison; they might push for mandatory minimum sentencing, for example, or harsher sentences for juveniles. In response, one of the Prison Architect developers says, “This is quite sinister…this is very dark stuff…if we put these options into the game, we’re treading into terribly terribly dark territory,” as if the chosen subject matter itself were not already sinister, as if the options of building execution chambers and sniper towers were not just as dark.  

Though Prison Architect by no means idealizes the experience of managing a private prison, far from it, the game’s premise assumes a binary frame, “two sides” to an argument. It quickly becomes clear to the player that there is a good way and a bad way to run a prison, and that the motivations of each side will come into conflict. On the one side, the “bad” side, is the harsh punitive approach: mass surveillance, solitary confinement, execution chambers, armed guards, and sniper towers. On the other, the “good” side, is the rehabilitation approach: classrooms, drug and alcohol treatment, workshops, and free time. This conflict is dramatized in the game’s narrative campaign, which pits a tough on crime mayor against a bleeding heart academic. Interestingly, profits can be accrued through either approach. The most effective way to make money is to house a large number of prisoners and to keep them subdued, and this can be achieved through either suppression or rehabilitation or a combination of the two. Prisoners who have been deemed more dangerous, or “maximum security” present a greater challenge for suppression and reform, and are thus more lucrative. The fact that the game so easily combines reform and suppression in the interest of profit shows how the logic of rehabilitation is used to justify prisons as a fundamentally necessary part of our existence, like air. The punishment versus rehabilitation dichotomy of Prison Architect dismisses the possibility of abolition, the idea that prisons are fundamentally wrong. I think this comes through in Pedercini’s critique, though it’s sort of blunted in the way he offers it, as a series of helpful suggestions as to how the game might be improved.

The most unsettling thing about Prison Architect is that it feels like the way we think about, or refuse to think about, prisoners. Images of prison saturate our media and culture in a way that commoditizes and dehumanizes those who are incarcerated. An implied, ideal image of the reformed prison, based on a logic of efficiency and rehabilitation, renews the demand for prisons and allows the overall system to continue to accumulate value. Prison Architect is both a simulation and a collection of cartoonishly rendered narrative objects with no agency. Yussef Cole has pointed out that the game offers no outlet for prisoners to organize and take political action. When prisoners riot, they attack guards and break equipment, but do not attempt to make demands or run the facility themselves. In Prison Architect, riots exist to offer the player excitement, intrigue, and a bloody mess to clean up. The developers have since introduced an “escape mode,”  which further reinforces violence as the prisoners’ only outlet for self-expression. Escape mode allows you to play from the perspective of a prisoner trying to escape the prison. The only way for the player to build the necessary reputation to recruit other members in their escape plan is to pick fights and break stuff. In their video response to Pedercini’s critique, the developers acknowledge the excessive violence as an unrealistic feedback mechanism that could possibly be smoothed out in the development process. The game itself would be reformed, even as the players simultaneously reformed and expanded their own prisons within the simulation: reform as expansion, reform as optimization.

In a forum discussion, a father describes the play style of his son, who had managed to build what he refers to as a “luxury prison”:

“My son has played Prison Architect for over 50 hours. He says that the mistake most people make on the game is that to maximise profits you need to minimise expenses. In fact, he runs what he calls a luxury prison: the rooms are 5x10 meters, have televisions, phone booths, a sofa, a desk, a shower, a bed, a toilet, a chair, a window and a weights bench; they have 6 pool tables to share; no compulsory work; 8 visitor tables; and 3x three course maximum variety meals a day. The principle advantage is that the prisoners are happy and never riot so you need far fewer guards and hence wage expenses. He also takes a personal approach in that if there has been a riot he notes which individuals were involved, tries to understand why they rioted, and makes sure he fixes it.”

I think as with most games, it often shows more about your personality than that of the creators of the game.”

Note the assumed neutrality of the game: it often shows more about your personality than that of the creators of the game. Also noteworthy is the phrase “luxury prison,” which truly captures the contradiction inherent to the reformist imagining of the ideal prison. In my experience, it is true that Prison Architect allows you to create so-called luxury prisons. You are awarded cash grants for completing objectives such as educating prisoners or employing them as laborers, but the most lucrative commodities in the game are the prisoners themselves. Prison Architect makes a salient point about for-profit prisons in that it shows that they are paid per prisoner. In America, the hard labor of convicts was exploited initially in the form of chain gangs and convict leasing. Now, the bodies of prisoners produce value for corrections corporations whether or not they are coerced into performing labor. Furthermore, this profit incentive extends beyond the private into the public sector through the consumption and production of goods within the strictly controlled economy of the penitentiary: corporations sell goods in bulk to prisons for prisoners to consume, and they buy cheap goods and services that prisoners produce through their labor. The primary incentive to continue playing Prison Architect comes from expanding and bringing in more prisoners. Overly rapid expansion is likely to produce instability and riots, so the challenge of the game is learning to expand efficiently. The secondary incentive to keep playing is to see if prisoners re-offend once they are released back into society (this is represented numerically by a simple percentage). The rehabilitation incentive slots easily into the profit and expansion motive. Each individual prisoner is given a “reform” grade on a scale of one to ten, which shows how well the prisoner has been rehabilitated by programs the player has instituted, and how likely prisoners are to be released early on parole as a result. Employing the prisoners in workshops, for example, contributes to a better reform grade. You get a cash bonus for prisoners that are released early, plus another cash bonus for bringing in new prisoners to replace them. With the right system of reform programs in place, you can set up a profitable conveyor belt for releasing and bringing in new prisoners.

My intention is not to castigate the developers of Prison Architect. In many ways, the game’s chosen theme and aesthetic simply makes explicit the fantasy of regimentation, management, and control more subtly implied in other games like Dwarf Fortress. My intention, rather, is to highlight the overwhelming dominance of the reformist ideology underlying Prison Architect and other media like it. It cannot be overstated how difficult it is for people, Americans especially, to imagine life without prisons. While images of the prison are ubiquitous in culture, the prison system makes those who have been incarcerated invisible: relationships are severed, labor anonymized, and voting rights revoked. Although, as Davis notes, the prison is in some ways more humane than some of the punishments that predate it, incarceration hasn’t completely replaced corporal and capital punishment either. Physical abuse is common in prisons, and the death penalty is still legal in thirty-one American states. What prisons have undeniably achieved is they have managed to remove these punishments and their recipients from the public eye.

Every time I’ve brought up the concept of prison abolition in personal conversations, the question immediately posed is always “What’s the alternative?”, and I am reminded of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), which argues that we have become incapable of imagining a society outside the framework of capitalism. As late capitalist, neoliberal institutions continue to buckle and fracture, one could certainly make the case that we are now living in a post-capitalist realist society. For many, imagining something beyond capitalism is becoming less and less optional and theoretical. However, the suffocating realism of incarceration, an essential component of global capitalism, is alive and well. With some prodding, this question of “What’s the alternative?” is usually translated to mean “What would we do with the murderers and rapists?” What about those who commit unforgivable violence, those who are fundamentally incapable of living in society? What does one do with such people if one does not have prisons to contain them? It’s always a difficult conversation because it is impossible to answer such a question in the abstract. Trying to come up with a one-to-one substitute for prison derails conversations about what an alternative society should actually look like. Criminalization is based on who we decide is violent and how. The question of the alternative assumes that there is a clear distinction between violent and nonviolent members of society. Such a question only betrays more underlying questions: What violence was committed and why? How did this person become violent? What responsibility do we have to someone who has committed violence? What would you do with this person if it were up to you, or your community? How do we participate in violence? Can you imagine becoming a violent person? What causes people to commit violence? How does our culture produce violence, and how do we treat it?

A recent article in the New Inquiry by Victoria Law discusses how the violent versus nonviolent dichotomy that typically defines conversations around criminal justice reform falls short. How do we keep more “nonviolent” offenders out of prison, so goes the logic, and how do we reform the violent ones? This binary frame is similar to the one used to categorize undocumented people as either criminals or “good” immigrants who “deserve” to stay in the country. It’s a framework that encourages society to criminalize more people as violent, especially victims of abuse, while neglecting the root causes of violence. For example, Bresha Meadows is a fifteen-year-old girl from Ohio who was first incarcerated at age fourteen. She was charged with the aggravated murder of her father after she shot and killed him. Bresha’s mother Brandi says that her daughter had been struggling with mental health, and was defending herself and her family. According to the mother, Bresha’s father had been abusing them for years. Bresha was detained before receiving a trial, spent most of her time in a juvenile jail, and was eventually transferred to a state facility for a mental health evaluation, which her family was forced to pay for out of pocket. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for May 8, and a trial is scheduled for May 22, which will be Day 297 of Bresha’s confinement. There is an active campaign to #FreeBresha, return her to her family, and have all charges dropped. The logic of incarceration has deemed this girl violent, and I don’t think cases like this one can be written off as exceptions or “mistakes” because there are many similar cases (of both minors and adults) in which victims of violence and abuse are criminalized as irredeemably violent themselves. This is what the prison industrial complex is designed to do: perpetuate violence in order to fill up cells. Every prison built is a covenant to fill it.

Democracy 3 (2013) is another game that illustrates how prisons remain a permanent fixture of society, how the notion of their elimination is off limits even to our imaginations. This game simulates government, budgets, and policy on a more macro level than Prison Architect. You play as the head of one of six Western nations: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the U.S., or the U.K. When you load the game up, the title screen music sounds like something right out of the West Wing. Your job is to run the country as you see fit, get reelected, and avoid assassination. For the purposes of this analysis, I mostly played as the U.S.

In Democracy 3 “crime” and “violent crime” are separate categories. The more general category of crime includes “car crime, burglary, etc., but also covers fraud and other similar crimes,” while violent crime includes “murder, rape, and muggings.” The distinction the game makes between violence and nonviolence is worth further consideration. Consider how fraud is seen as a nonviolent crime, even though it can cause a relatively large number of people to experience real suffering in the form of crushing debt or loss of a home. The significant physical and mental suffering inflicted on poor populations by corporate fraud is not considered a violent crime because it is generally committed by rich people from the comfort of a fine office chair.

What becomes clear from these definitions is that crime is obscured by the simulation, rather than defined by the player through policy. Crime is an output, an effect. It is something the player must reign in, rather than define. Drug addiction increases general crime, especially if drugs are legalized, which increases consumption. Alcohol abuse increases violent crime, which can be reduced by investing in education, or by instituting a death penalty. There is something called “racial tension” (racism?) that also increases violent crime. A “racial profiling” policy, though unpopular, reduces both violent crime and general crime.

Laws and institutions work in pretty much the same way in Democracy 3. It costs a certain amount of political capital to institute new policies or discard ones that are already in place. The more controversial a policy, the more political capital it requires to legislate or eliminate. Many policies, such as “armed police” can be cancelled, or removed entirely with enough political capital, while some can be defunded, but never removed. Here are some examples of policies that you can “cancel”: foreign aid, income tax, state schools, state healthcare. Those institutions which cannot be cancelled include border controls, military funding, intelligence services, prisons, and police. One would be hard pressed to find a more illustrative example of how the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the surveillance state work in concert to reinforce the logic of crime and punishment. In the world of Democracy 3, diverting resources away from prisons objectively increases unemployment and crime. There is no voting block for which diverting funds away from prisons is popular, while increased funding for prisons is popular with both liberals and conservatives. In the world envisioned by Democracy 3, nearly every policy and institution can be eliminated, except for prisons, police, surveillance, and the military. While the game does offer alternative avenues for reducing crime, such as education and youth club subsidies, prisons and police can never be abolished, even once crime has been pretty much eliminated.

The text description of the “private prison” policy reads, “Liberals will have ethical concerns about profiting from incarceration, but still be pleased if spending is high enough to promote rehabilitation.” In other words, spending money on prisons translates directly to rehabilitation. Minimal funding of prisons is described as “overcrowded cells,” while maximum funding is described as  “extensive rehabilitation.” Though crime increases as a response to poverty, unemployment, and drug abuse, the prison system itself never expands or contracts. It is either funded or underfunded. Devoting more capital to prisons means offering greater support to the prisoners that exist. There is no acknowledgement of the fact that pouring resources into the prison industrial complex increases demand for prisoners and incentivizes criminalization.

The game also includes assassination, as feedback which discourages players from becoming overly ambitious in their pursuit of radical governance. Constituents are fairly trigger happy, so one of the most difficult challenges is learning how to institute policies that solve problems and get you re-elected while avoiding the wrath of radical groups alienated by these policies. In a first playthrough, both a black power group and a conservative reactionary militia were plotting my assassination after I had disarmed the police, defunded the military, and all but eliminated border controls. Conservatives were angry because less soldiers and more immigrants, while ethnic minorities were angry because of the rise in unemployment, so-called racial tension, and crime, all results of my diversion of resources away from the military, police, and border control. Based on the game’s modeling, I concluded that the most effective way to pursue revolutionary governance would be to bulk up the surveillance state with cameras, wiretaps, and curfews in order to protect myself from assassination.

There are no concrete resources in Democracy 3 such as food or water, only dollars. As John Brindle has pointed out, it is a purely economic model. The game positions itself as an arbiter of competing ideologies, adopting a rhetorical position of neutrality. This is not unusual for games. Games are pure ideology, in that they force you to observe the world through a lens. The lens, hidden in the plain sight of a user interface, is the necessary fiction that allows you to play the game.

The ideological vision of Democracy 3 brings us back to the “two sides” frame described earlier in reference to Prison Architect. The promotional flier for the game reads “socialist paradise?” or “capitalist utopia?”. This techno-utopian vision asserts that there are two clear sides to consider in every debate. Surprising no one, I played with the intention of creating a socialist paradise. I wasn’t awarded the official “Socialist Paradise” achievement until I maxed out funding for the police, the prison system, border security, and intelligence services. Maximizing funding for border security was necessary for eliminating unemployment and ghettos. Another indirect result was reduced “racial tension” because of a decrease in immigration and the ethnic minority population. Fully funding surveillance also eliminated organized crime, which had persisted despite the legalization and taxation of all drugs.

Democracy 3, through the logics of capitalist realism and mass incarceration, allowed me to create a neoliberal imperialist “socialism,” a utopia that would make U.S. policy proud. In a sense, it models the neoliberal dream that some would argue has been shattered by the election of Donald Trump, and which for America reached its height with the institution of “Great Society” programs such as Medicare. My popularity at the polls after fully funding all crime and punishment institutions was literally 100%. The opposition party had been eliminated, so I ran unopposed. Since the game doesn’t model voter suppression (only voter apathy), I can only assume the people’s support for the effects of these institutions, across all competing ideologies and voting blocks, was genuine.

You won’t like what these stunning sculptures are made of

Crap Futures were in New York for this year’s Interaction conference. It was uplifting, enlightening, inspiring, and exhausting. Here are the slides from our presentation - somehow we condensed 15 months of Crap Futures thinking into 20 minutes.

Of course design can be and do all of these things, but for the most part it has become so linked to the market and conspicuous consumption that it has essentially become a novelty machine.

This imposes constraints that limit the potential of design as a positive force. In this talk I’ll explore some of these constraints before suggesting ways of re-thinking them.

The first constraint is progress dogma.

Christian Schussele’s Men of Progress - a painting commissioned in 1857 to celebrate some of the key scientists and inventors that had positively altered the course of contemporary civilisation.

Despite powerful criticism - voiced over the past two centuries by Romantics such as William Blake, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, and avant-garde provocateurs like Dada - the belief that technology will solve our problems remains largely pervasive.

According to Langdon Winner:

Not much has changed: think of Donald Trump’s 2016 meeting of leading technologists (more women than Men of Progress … but not many).

The power of Silicon Valley continues to shape all our futures: familiar utopian dreams made possible by advances in technology - smart everything, automation, robotics and so on.

Of course these things can improve people’s lives, but they can also disrupt enormously. This is the irony of the rise of Trump and the pro-leave EU campaign in the UK - the cry of immigrants taking jobs - that automation is a far more obvious threat but is rarely mentioned in these circles.

According to a 2016 report by the Eurasia Group consultancy, ‘the rise of technologists’ is one of the ‘top risks’ at present - due to the fact that ‘highly influential non-state actors from the world of technology are entering the realm of politics with unprecedented assertiveness’.

Removing the constraint of progress dogma means that we are not simply selling futures but also exploring what could go wrong - an approach we began developing in the early 2000s.

This is the audio tooth implant, developed with Jimmy Loizeau in 2001. Based on the growing ubiquity of mobile telephones we imagined that the next logical step would be for the phone to become part of our body. We pitched this as a semi-real concept at the Science Museum in London.

We sculpted a model tooth and cast it in clear resin with an old computer chip embedded in the middle.

It was broadly disseminated by the popular media - here on the front cover of Time magazine.

But this is an example of the true product here - a thoughtful and considered expert appraisal of what could go wrong - before it’s actually available. This aims to facilitate a more responsible approach to the technological future.

The second constraint is means and ends.

In the 1920s Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers made the following statement, essentially signalling the rise of conspicuous consumption and the worship of gadgets. Designers were (and still are) complicit in this process.

Albert Borgmann has another way of describing it through his device paradigm: things are inseparable from their context: we engage and interact with them in their worlds. Devices, on the other hand, unburden us of their contexts through the operation of background machinery; the more advanced the technology, the more invisible or concealed the machinery. Borgmann used the fireplace as an example of a thing - it provides a focal point for the household, it links people to local terrains through the gathering of firewood and demands an idea of how much wood is required to get through the winter.

In contrast the central heating system disburdens us of all these other elements as the means become invisible - controlled and managed by others. Designers and consumers alike have become obsessed with the end - glossy glamorous products - whilst the systems behind become increasingly opaque.

This pathway essentially leads to automation - devices satisfying all of our needs as efficiently as possible through techniques such as machine learning, prediction algorithms and so on. Completely invisible, intangible, and operated by others.

Jean Baudrillard was already describing the consequences of automation in the 1960’s.

Removing the constraint of end focus encourages the designer to think beyond the generic solutions and objects of so-called desire to re-engage with local systems - making and materials.

This is an open-source hardware vacuum cleaner designer by Royal College of Art graduate Tom Lynch. All elements sourced or made locally and all documented on the project’s wiki - a fully functional product for under $50. The challenge is to combine the maker ideology with good design - the competition is strong as consumers are programmed to desire sexy products.

The OpenStructures WaterBoiler, originally designed and composed by Jesse Howard in collaboration with Thomas Lommée, provides some inspiration as to how this new aesthetic might be achieved.

Constraint No.3: Future Nudge We can only design what the product could realistically evolve into.

The economist Robert Heilbroner described the way technology (and therefore technological products) evolve - this means that what comes next will be similar to what came before.

The car is a good example. Travel is instrumentalised as we focus on the object rather than the act. It iterates in small steps made possible by advances in specific areas.

This constrains us to design only what the product could conceivably evolve into. Smart products, for example, are usually existing products simply updated with smart technology.

Mobile telephones provide another good example - 7 phones in 7 years - each a small advancement on the previous. Typical progression is derived from Moore’s law - smaller, more powerful, more efficient (more sales, revenue, etc.).

Re-constraining future nudge allows us to imagine what might happen should we step out of the lineage - to focus for example on how we might design for quality experiences. 

The Iso-phone was developed in 2003 to re-think the telephone from the perspective of qualitative experience rather than efficiency.

The concept used sensory deprivation theory to a facilitate a reduction in sensory input - the only thing the wearer experiences is the voice of someone else arriving from somewhere else in the world. Here’s a short video of the project:

The final constraint is Infrastructure.

I’m going to explore the subject of energy, but infrastructural and legacy constraints inform almost everything we do and everything we design - from food systems to transport, manufacturing to entertainment.

Tesla’s invention of AC current afforded the building of huge power stations built in the countryside, generating power through the burning of fossil fuels.

Radially distributed across nations via grid systems …

Arriving magically at our houses via sockets in the walls. These sockets and the plugs that are inserted into them dictate how all electrical products are used and how all products are designed.

With my Crap Futures co-author Julian Hanna we have been thinking about how to re-constrain energy infrastructure on our home island of Madeira, based on the implementation of renewables.

As a place with ample sun, wind, rain, and sea it would be easy to assume that renewable approaches to energy would be thriving in Madeira. What you see when you fly over the island supports that notion: vast banks of solar photovoltaic panels line several of the exposed hillsides; wind farms are exposed to the full force of the gales blowing in from the Atlantic.

However, beneath the optimistic surface lies a darker reality.

The (oversimplified) problem is this:

Solar PVs only generate energy while the sun shines. Wind farms generate energy when the wind blows. The wind is unpredictable and the sun shines during the day when most people are at work, meaning that energy cannot realistically be consumed in real time. The only viable option at the moment is to sell energy back to the grid; unfortunately this conflicts with the power company’s business model. So while incentives seem to abound, the reality is that these incentives are diminishing. Portugal practices an instantaneous net-metering scheme, meaning that the energy generated by the PV system has to be consumed at the same instant that it is produced to be considered self-consumption. The grid injection tariff is four times lower than the consumption tariff, forcing solar producers to self-consume and not inject any solar power into the grid. As things stand, users of renewables still rely on the grid during dark or windless periods, and therefore utility owners argue - with some reason - that they should pay for grid upkeep.

While the infrastructure battle rages on, what else can be done?

By thinking about what’s beyond the wall - local contexts, landscapes, materials, skills, culture - it becomes possible to develop bespoke solutions. In Madeira that means cliffs and cliff-side communities. Many Madeiran communities are built on cliff-sides with drops ranging from a common 7-8 metres in the centre of Funchal to the 780 metre Cabo Girão on the south coast. These provide one solution to the storage issues that problematise solar panels - gravity batteries. The aim is to use locally sourced and inexpensive parts with minimal complex making.

We’re working on a book of 100 alternative energy ideas …

From small operational prototypes such as this low power gravity battery - exploiting the vertical nature of the island - to more spectacular, ambitious, even crazy concepts such as this huge series of elevators in our capital city of Funchal.

Inspired by the Neo-Gothic splendour of the Elevador de Santa Justa, Lisbon (1902):

Here’s a more serious prototype that we’re currently testing.

All parts are sourced or made locally. Solar energy lifts the mass during the daytime, storing it as potential energy. Allowing the mass to drop releases the energy when it is needed.

We have a mass - in this case around 15kg that rotates a pulley as it falls. This turns the shaft of a DC motor via a gear box, increasing the revolutions.

And the latest iteration: using a locally found scrap motorcycle engine as the gearbox, ready-made and super efficient, minimises complex making.

Finally, a video of the prototype - it’s a bit rough and ready as we only tested it last week (and I edited it on the plane over).

The best aspect of this design is the tangible relationship with energy that it affords. Turning up the volume makes the mass fall faster, reducing the time available to listen to the music. In the next steps we’re planning to boil a kettle and toast some bread …

Thanks for listening. Find out more by reading the rest of our blog.

With the autumnal equinox upon us, Crap Futures is nearing its first anniversary. We began shooting ideas back and forth last September when James arrived in Madeira. Now, after a long, hot summer, it seems like a good moment to take stock and reflect on the past year whilst also making plans for what comes next.

In the post When the sun shines we gave an overview of our ongoing design project. This has been ticking along in the background since early 2016, with time spent articulating the research methodology, transforming the concept into funding proposals, and identifying and discussing with potential collaborators. Back in April we described the problem of using renewable energy sources on the island (and beyond), identifying some of the factors currently hindering their implementation - for example historical legacies. The project asks:

What might our energy infrastructure look like if it were not constrained by these outdated constructs?

A key motivation has always been to move beyond the discursive, the critical, the speculative and the fictional. As we wrote at the time: ‘With this project (unusually) we’re not interested in fiction.’ In retrospect this statement seems a bit rash. So before moving into the making phase, we thought it necessary to probe a little deeper into the relationship between fact and fiction. Or more precisely, What is the role of fiction when trying to make change - desperately needed change - in the real world?

To start with Bruce Sterling’s familiar definition:

‘Design fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.’

There are several keywords here that demand closer examination. First, fiction - in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek describes the viewer’s reading (of cinema) by stating that, ‘if something gets too traumatic, too violent, even too filled in with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality - we have to fictionalise it’. This statement is helpful as it succinctly describes two states of being and the relationship between them: the nonfiction world, defined by the coordinates of reality, and its fictional counterpart (diegesis).

Second, diegetic - from diegesis: the world in which the story takes place and for which the prototypes are designed. Through the manipulation of a particular set of coordinates, a fictional or alternative world can be constructed.

Third, a more complex issue is raised by the use of design when combined with the term change. The recent emergence of counter or oppositional forms of design (such as design fiction etc.) suggests that there are problems or limitations with mainstream design; for example, design’s affiliation with the market and the prevailing demands of consumption and innovation. These are the (normative) designer’s coordinates of reality: in practice experienced as constraints that limit the potential of design to make substantive change (see Future nudge). Designing for a carefully crafted diegesis can provide new constraints, in turn facilitating new solutions.

Fact and fiction should not exist as a dichotomy but rather an elastic scope of possibility. Good design fictions do not shatter the coordinates of reality; they stretch and manipulate them in carefully crafted ways, hence the suspension of disbelief. But, and this is important, to what end? Sterling’s phrase ‘deliberate use’ suggests purpose … but what is the purpose?

In Building Imaginary Worlds, Mark J.P. Wolf examines why authors find it necessary to invent other worlds. He concludes that the answer lies in ‘the changing of Primary World defaults, to amaze, entertain, satirize, propose possibilities, or to simply make an audience more aware of defaults they take for granted’.

In his introduction to Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury offers some additional motivations:

‘Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Because it’s good to look forward, not back. Because we need to illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take. Because the world of the future seems more enticing or more interesting than the world of today. Because we need to warn you. To encourage. To examine. To imagine.)’

In the closing sentence of his book Technophobia! Daniel Dinello suggests that ‘At its best, science fiction projects a dark vision of the Technologist’s posthuman future that encourages us to create a better one.’

But does highlighting wrong paths lead us to preferable ones? 

This question was raised in Republic of Salivation, a post on MoMA’s ‘online curatorial experiment’ Design and Violence:

‘Do violent, dystopian visions ever lead to positive, substantive change?’

Design fiction futures, it is true, are often dystopian - this is one of several lines of critique aimed at design fiction projects. The upcoming Speculative Now! conference in Split, Croatia, for example, has chosen to focus debate on the role of speculative design in the ‘real world’. Similarly with our project we aim to advance the goals and practice of design fiction by defining positive paths. Our approach will bring fiction-based prototypes back into real life, seek to produce tangible societal outcomes, and work to turn (positive) aspects of fiction into fact. Design fiction can help us work toward ‘the future we actually want’, imposing our own agency in how the future happens.

In our next post we will examine three stages of design fiction, explaining how a carefully contrived diegesis can provide the ideal framework for redesigning the real world.

Images: 

Game theory is the place where politics, economics, psychology and math meet, and it offers the seductive promise of being able to quantify empirically optimal outcomes from thorny problems ranging from whether to go to war to how to split the tab at a restaurant.

The published, peer-reviewed world of game theory has reached many “counterintuitive” conclusions, many of which were cataloged by Stanford Postdoctoral Fellow William Spaniel in 2014. You could spend all day getting lost in these.

* There’s a reason why gas stations are on the same corner and politicians adopt very similar platforms. And it’s the same reason.Source.

* If you pay the value you think something is worth, you are going to end up with a negative net profit. Source.

* Knowing just slightly more about the value of your car than a potential buyer can make it impossible to sell it. Source.

* A biased media may be better than an unbiased media. Source.

* You might want to shoot to miss in war. Source.

New York is one of four states considering legislation that would guarantee your right to get your stuff fixed by independent repair centers, curbing manufacturers’ attempts to limit access to technical documentation and parts, meaning you pay less to keep your stuff working, and that means that your gadgets don’t become immortal, toxic e-waste.

But the electronic industry, led by Apple, is running a hardcore lobbying campaign to prevent this, trying to preserve manufacturers’ monopolies on service.

The Right to Repair coalition has an open letter you can sign onto that they’ll send to the New York Senate and Assembly. More than 14,000 New Yorkers have already sent their stories in. Tell your friends!

Eve Online (“spreadsheets in space”) is the infamously intricate massively multiplayer space trade/conquest game where real world money can be traded for in-game currency, making the battles fought there consequential in a way that sets it apart from other games.

Eve has seen many massive wars before, as well as daring acts of corporate espionage and a $50,000 Ponzi scheme, all of which are perfectly legit in the game’s context.

But now the game has been brought to the brink of a battle that beggars belief, as the notorious Clusterfuck Coalition (formerly the Goonswarm) has used a tribute system based on ancient Persian tithing to create a galactic empire they call “The Imperium,” whose leaders have waxed fat and arrogant (and have attempted to cash in on in the real world).

It’s got to be too much for the other players. Working with a war-chest supplied by one of the bankers behind I Want ISK, a virtual casino that allows players to gamble with in-game currency (which, remember, can be purchased with real-world money). The looming battle looks to be the biggest in the game’s history.

We just released our new build : Timruk!

http://oleomingus.itch.io/timruk

It is a storybook from within the world of Somewhere. And here is a brief history of the text.

‘The parable of Timruk and other Stories’ is a collection of folklore believed to have originated in Kayamgadh.

These stories were found carved upon temple walls across BhulaDesh. And the imprints from the carvings were first compiled into written form by a traveling poet at the court of Rajah Brimanath at the Kotananku presidency in 1821.

This edition was later transcribed into a large folio, crafted by the fabled calligraphist Maguru. The edition was accompanied by a set of miniature paintings that were scavenged from the various Persian and Mongolian manuscripts collected at the Maharajah’s library.

The historian Prof. James P Fielding translated the folio edition while working at Bhutagunj, a British cartographic outpost near the Kotananku ghats.

His translation was published as a companion to his controversial book,‘The several histories Kayamgadh’, after his death in 1903.