In the final week of the Year 2 curriculum, participating adolescents worked with media scholars, filmmakers, and staff in the theatre department at the University of Chicago to translate their scenarios into short films. Their characters and prototypes informed script-writing, and they engaged in workshops on storyboarding, acting, shooting, directing, and editing. These short films were generally conceived as advertisements for their speculative objects as a means to depict the future scenarios.


stills from “COMMUNITY HEALING PAIR, CHICAGO 2038” / 2018
Asha Edwards, David Bonsu

Community Healing Pair, Chicago, 2038 is a wearable communication system, comprised of a AR glasses and wristband. Users can access diverse perspectives of the neighbourhood through augmented reality and make use of local communicative functions. The proposed system imagines the capacity for AR to alternate users’ views between positive and negative realities of life on the South Side—reminding residents of their neighbourhood’s rich past and present of community activism while summoning support from each other to confront ongoing struggles with state violence enacted by the police.

Stills from CLONING MASKS AND PROTECTIVE MASKS, CHICAGO 2038 / 2018
Lauren Johnson, Shurri Peterson, Nia Nobles-Vincent

Cloning Masks and Protective Masks, Chicago, 2038 animated the issue of police violence through the narrative of an inventor trying desperately to keep his son safe from police confrontations. The underlying narrative illustrates real life experiences shared by participating adolescents. Police violence creates intergenerational tensions when parents are desperate to keep their children out of harm’s way, but the young people are eager to fight for justice.

The project’s reulting historical collages, fictional-historical design objects, future speculative artefacts, and short films were publicly presented at multiple venues on Chicago’s South Side in 2019, in the exhibition “South Side Speculations.” This project deliberately conceived of these exhibitions as activatations of public space, producing new sites for discourse on topics that were richly and imaginatively investigated by local adolescents. This included  programming of events, workshops, and panel discussions that drew together South Side residents of specific communities—each creating new opportunities to discuss the issues under consideration, including the merits of the resulting future speculations. The participating adolescents thus transformed into public speakers, docents, and topical experts. Beyond a general public audience, these events were attended by and generated participation from local high school students (the adolescents’ peers), parents and family members, and elders who participated in the oral history component. In this way, the exhibitions and their programs generated intergenerational discourse stimulated by the creative, critical work of local adolescents who participated in the summer education program.

—
The project demonstrates a move toward what has been coined “prefigurative design”: design that “prompts practitioners and researchers to both imagine alternative futures and to structure design processes to manifest them in the present” (Asad 2018). A two-summer, interdisciplinary educational experience for twenty-three adolescents was facilitated in a city that has closed over 200 public schools since 2002 (Lutton, et al 2018). The curriculum blended methods from History, Literary and Media Studies, and Design to facilitate the production of new public historical narratives plus proposals for healthier future neighbourhoods.