We started off with a quick round of everybody shortly presenting their pretotypes in a few sentences. This enabled us to get direct feedback from Antonio and Björn, which helps to sharpen and further develop those pretotypes for the presentation on monday. For me, next to the findings I lsited in the post about yesterday, I am going to try to create a pretotype of the digital visualization to create a starting point for this part of the work as well. In my opinion, I think this is crucial for my process, since this will enable me to see strengths and weaknesses of these visualizations on a hands-on basis. So this will be my first practical outcome and, concluding from these findings, I am going to derive the spatial installation and its appearance.

Ad-hoc lectures

Antonio Scarponi

He gave an overview over the history of geopgraphic visualization in form of maps. At first, there were just drawings and manifestations of coastal lines in order to be able to ship aroudn them. Later the need of an acutal representation was raised, followed by coloring certain areas of the maps to show the shares of a nation due to colonialism. Since the 70's these ways of visualizing are strongly questioned and redefined. For instance, Buckminster Fuller provided a completey different approach to the visual depiction of the world. Most of these vsualizations or voices out of that time criticize a colonistic view of world, for instance when the equator is shifted more south. This makes the north, not just visually, more important. 

The conclusion of his talk was mainly to raise awareness of these problems and to point out that everything a designer does is political and also always critical, since everybody has its own understanding and expressing that subconsciously. Additionally, the visual geograph should be aware of the fact, that every map is carrying out social, political and economic informations, and the problems that come with it.

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Björn Franke

He was talking about critical design and how it distinguishes itself from "regular" design processes and practices. He pointsout, that critical design is more a design manifestation of an investigation of a topic, whereas "regular" design is mostly aimning at solving actual and practical problems. In critical design, it becomes the medium of communication, not the solution.

As an example, he showed the work of the contemporary photographer and artist Trevor Paglen, who was visualizing things, which are not there and built a map of places that do not exist. For instance, he took photographs of Area 51 or other hidden places that are kept secret. He was also collecting badges of organizations that officially not exist. The symbols of these organizations are still manifesting itselves in the existing world. In this case, the act of collecting is an investigating act, which then is "critical design", if you would want to call it that way. In a further discussion, we went into the question of what good or bad critical design could be. We came to the conclusion that good critical design is when the practise or methodology ith which a matter has been investigated aligns with the findings of the investigation. Practically, this means that it is amazingly helpful when Paglen plays with the means of blurred images, when investingating secret and hidden places. This is most and foremost a atter of technical necessarities or limitations but it also communicates the feeling and experience from recognizing something yet unknwon in the distance. We were asking ourselves, if the truth of the findings itself render themselves obsolete, when such a strong metaphor is used.

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Exercise #4: situate

After the lectures, an introduction of the last exercise followed. We have the task to think about how we you position ourselves in the field as a designer. We shoudl think about a possible future me. Do we consider ourselves more as an artist, as a scientist, as a designer or as a mix of it all? Are we working in the field of critictal design? In the field of service design or in the field of physical computing? What could be magazines our work will be published in? Where do we want to be exhibited? Who are the other people who are we working with?