- Credit: James King
Last semester, speculative designer James King worked with myself and a small group of science and public health students at the University of Michigan to explore how a fusion of science and creative art can lead to new insights and modes of communication. The exercise was part of the A World of Surprises project – a project James is working on as the Witt Artist in residence at the UM School of Art and Design.
Part of the aim was to take these science-grounded students out of their comfort zone, expose them to some radical new ideas and perspectives, and see what happens.
The results were impressive! Once the students realized that they weren’t bound by the rigid limitations of their science education, they became enthused over using creative techniques to tell science-grounded stories that connected with people on a far deeper level than just the facts would allow.
Today the group presented the fruits of their final assignment: to produce a piece of creative work that captures the tension – in narrative form – between imagined catastrophic risks and experienced mundane risks. As a group, we were interested in the tension between the catastrophic consequences often imagined to arise from human endeavors, and the mundane reality that often develops.
I’ll try to showcase all of the projects over the next few weeks. They were all, in their own way, quite brilliant. Coming up in future posts there will be:
- The Tale of Rhino Banana (a brilliant story of a technological breakthrough that runs up against public resistance);
- Salutary lessons from the struggle between evil and the divine in the middle ages;
- A visual juxtaposition of comparative risks related to Fukushima; and
- A new-future story of technological sophistication and mundane consequences.
(I’ll add the links as they are posted – The Tale of Rhino Banana will be up first)
James will be back in Ann Arbor for the culmination of the A World Of Surprises project in March – stay tuned on that.