Living with your own ideas

Dr Frankenstein had to ‘involve himself personally’ with his creation, and so will we. Here, you do not get to create a soul-crushing algorithm, a useless object, or a frustratingly horrible process without your design grinding you down like a bored CIA agent with a CV featuring waterboarding experience.

After a brief fling with our rapidly propotyped ‘companions’ (see elsewhere), we were asked to commit ourselves to a challenge somehow related to our (mythical) project.

the challenge [4 nov 22]

The challenge I settled on as a first exploration (and which ended up being the only one I did) is somewhat boring on an experiential level: for twenty-four hours, I wrote down every mid-sized object I used (= no roads, buildings, infrastructure, etc, and no oxygen molecules). Originally, I had inteded to explore the topic more practically, trying to make things myself as I moved to used them; but the bureaucratic and hierarchical aspects of my life decided to interfere with my challenge, forcing me to deal with issues related to my landlord for most of the second day.

It was, however, interesting as a detailed/first-person theoretical engagement with my topic of predilection - playful (and distributed, autonomy-maximising) production. Facing the things I use on a daily basis, and their entanglement with supply chains and networks of people helped me understand the complexity of constructing alternatives to current ways of producing. As I tried to make sense of the different kinds of objects I had made use of, a few categories of objects emerged, based on how they or their production process might be replaced (open image in new tab to be able to zoom) :

This has a direct impact on the focus I’m choosing to set for the next few steps: I will likely concentrate on relatively simple , mid-sized objects, and explore how they can be produced in a distributed, time-saving, lazy, autonomy-maximising, and hopefully playful manner.