Uncategorized | Miniature Material Culture

So, I arrived at the end of my first “proper” week as a postgraduate student, clutching my brand-new ID card (which bears a strangely vertically distorted image of my previously-handsome visage) and an armful of books wrestled from MMU library. As was bound to happen, something in my pile of books set off the alarm at the exit barrier and I was leapt on by a gleeful security guard (it was the slimmest volume that was the culprit). At Leicester University library one is apparently regarded as more trustworthy – there the exit gates open without one having to use one’s card, and there are no hovering security staff. If the alarm goes off you simply go over to the desk to have the book rescanned. At MMU, you have to clutch your teetering pyramid of volumes in one hand and wield your ID card with the other. The barrier sulkily refuses to recognise you until you have done this at least three times. It is also noteworthy that the card scanner is set at a height obviously intended for use by small people. Then, when the alarm beeps, you are escorted to the desk to join a queue of cowering miscreants. It’s a good job that the desk staff are mostly motherly types, obviously chosen for their skills in dealing with potential book thieves…

Apart from this minor tussle with technology, my first week at MIRIAD was an excellent one. I indulged in cheerful and positive fraternisation with my peers, who are already generating exciting ideas within my overheated brain. I enjoyed seminars, and was inspired and energised. Several of us who share an interest in the recent past decided to create a Thursday afternoon work-group, which will be informal at first but may well develop.

I drank beer.

I met with my Director of Studies and one of my supervisors, who are both encouraging and full of interest as well as being nice people. I learned what oramatronics were/are. I earned a little kudos by volunteering to register people for a lecture. I decided to try to become involved in some aspects of the Designing our Futures initiative. I have a lengthening task list.

All very wonderful.

I also attended my first and last rehearsal of the universities wind orchestra. Last because there were already too many oboes (several of whom are more technically practiced than I) surrounded by a million flutes and clarinets. Not really my scene… I shall have to create my own ensemble – Aeolus II?

..or, could you speak up please, we can’t hear you at the back!

Along with some of my new fellow students, yesterday I attended the launch of Designing Our Futures, a Practice as Research Consortium North West (PARCNorthWest) initiative in which we are being encouraged to become involved over the next year. I think it is something in which I shall become involved, once I’ve worked out quite what it means.

As I listened to the various speakers discussing the theoretical and practical issues raised by our hopes and fears for the future, ironically I broke one of my personal rules and thought instead about my past. While I was at Imperial College in the late 1960s I often used to walk up Queens Gate on my way to the zoology department and pass a large, rounded fibreglass capsule, tucked in behind what I think was the chemistry department. This was, as far as I can remember, an experimental living “pod,” an indication, perhaps, of how and where we imagined we’d be living in the future. I have often wondered what happened to that project. Of course, brought up on The Eagle comic, Meccano Magazine and Scientific American, at that time I assumed that by the year 2012 we’d all be clad in transparent skin-tight all-weather suits that would show off our perfectly-proportioned and disease-free bodies, we would zip around in personal flying machines, work just a few hours a week surrounded by machines that provided us with almost-limitless leisure and live in glass-walled homes served by robots.

But significantly then, even in science fiction, we had no words that defined and described what we now call the Internet, the worldwide web and the knowledge economy. We also naively assumed that human existence would simply continue rapidly to improve. Hmmm. That improvement has been patchy, and not at all inclusive . Instead of a super-efficient capsule I live in a crumbling Victorian building. I drive around in an earth-bound vehicle with a wheel at each corner, based on nineteenth century technologies. The train in which I travelled from Manchester to Nottingham this afternoon would seem familiar to Robert Stephenson and the Wright brothers would easily recognise the form and function of the “modern” aircraft in which I flew back from Spain last weekend.

So, are we going to design futures that are merely enhancements of past and present technologies? Are we merely going to tinker with economics and politics? Are we going to be manacled to the balls and chains of religious and political fundamentalism? Are we going to continue to be (apparently willingly) dumbed down further and further? Will the futures designed by us, a privileged few, really include those millions without fresh water and sustainable food supplies to which Professor Hyatt alluded during the debate? Will we do more than just shuffle words we already know,,,

Or, are we going to design ways of living that we cannot yet imagine, for which we have as yet no words, no vocabulary, no language? I wonder! At the launch, people talked optimistically of us reaching a point in time of significant change and opportunity presented by advances in the technologies of the knowledge society. Yet we were sitting in a low-ceiling, gloomy room struggling to hear discussants who were not using microphones.

Well, I guess this means that I’m going to have to do more than just sit here…

Books and beginnings

Designing my future