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Seminar: Playing it safe – working through future transitions in the past

Elina travels to Lund during covid to talk about futures in the past, and is ecstatic to meet people IRL.

Published onSep 25, 2020
Seminar: Playing it safe – working through future transitions in the past

On the 25th of September, I visited Lund, and gave a breakfast seminar with the title: Playing it safe – working through future transitions in the past. My host was Johannes Stripple, and his colleagues, (working in for example the research projects Climaginaries or Forest Visions).

The breakfast seminar was a hybrid seminar, with some participants joining through zoom, and to my great joy, some joining live in the room! This I probably the most people I have met live since the 12 of March when I started working from home because of the Corona-pandemic. And I was ecstatic!

Look real people! All happy faces!

I also have a screen behind me that is projecting the slides for the participants in the room – and I also share the slides on zoom for the zoom participants. I did not tap into the sound in the zoom room (except for a weird malfunction in the beginning) so I do not know how that experience was, but I do think it all went fairly well. The camera on the screen at the far end of the picture zoomed automatically to where it heard a voice. Magic.

The teaser for my talk was : Elina will be presenting research on and with speculative design strategies in both ongoing and past projects. She will touch upon fictional abstracts and energy fictions as well as presenting upcoming work with the novel futuring techniques of pastcasting and recasting in a research project on energy transitions. In the presentation I touched upon Fictional Abstracts (used at a workshop at NordiCHI’18 and resulting in a paper in Futures), Vitiden (an energy fiction) and work on counterfactuals (like the Coalworld scenario) and past-facing futuring techniques in the research project Event Horizon.

After the seminar we spent a few hours talking about future applications together, and in the afternoon I took the train home. Overall a really nice trip, and I am thankful for being invited. Now, I have lots of new ideas and perspectives to mull over.

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