For the Speculative Edu community and website, James Auger talks with Daniel Kaplan about the Plurality University initiative and design’s relation to future imaginaries.

« Dystopias are easily crafted (just push one characteristic of today’s world to an extreme), while utopias need to rethink a lot of things – meaning that probably, dystopias and utopias are not exact opposites… »

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« Fiction helps to broaden the initial set of thinkable futures from which public debate or decision-making will start (imagine if the preparation for COP32 started with a much, much broader set of stories to pick from); it has the potential to “shift expectations” (I took that from an artist whose name I’ve forgotten), creating a different kind of public opinion pressure; it provides spaces for mental simulations of different alternatives, that allow for more complex thinking than, say, “models”, and that take subjectivity into account, allowing people to project themselves into it rather than thinking about it in abstract ways; it provides spaces for discussion where nobody can be said to “know” … »

Read the full interview >>