The job of a {broader, more inclusive set of design} brain{s} is to “produce {decolonised} future{s}”

Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps (my emboldening, below)

How can meaning make a difference? It doesn’t seem to be the kind of physical property, like temperature or mass or chemical composition, that could cause anything to happen. What brains are for is extracting meaning from the flux of energy impinging on their sense organs, in order to improve the prospects of the bodies that house them and provide their energy. The job of a brain is to “produce future” in the form of anticipations about the things in the world that matter to guide the body in appropriate ways. Brains are energetically very expensive organs, and if they can’t do this important job well, they aren’t earning their keep.

Matt Ward, interviewed by SpeculativeEdu

Colonising the future: If Speculative Design builds competency in thinking about future alternatives, the design community needs to ensure that it is aware of the structural inequalities that allow for a privileged voice. I think it’s become painfully obvious that we don’t need any more white male billionaires telling us how the future looks, therefore by moving Speculative Design outside of the “academy” we need to make sure it’s reaching people who don’t normally have say over the future. We should aim to empower alternative views about how the world could be.

 

It’s a great interview. Read the lot.

Station Identification

“Through gaps in the cloud layer she could see the light-but-dark blue of the Terran sky, subtle and full.

It looked like a blue dome flattened at the center, perhaps a few kilometers above the clouds—she reached up for it—although knowing too that it was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious.

A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything. The blue itself was complex, narrow in range but infinite within that range.

It was an intoxicating sight, and you could breathe it—one was always breathing it, you had to. The wind shoved it into you!

Breathe and get drunk, oh my, to be free of all restraint, minimally clothed, lying on the bare surface of a planet, sucking in its atmosphere as if it were an aqua vitae, feeling in your chest how it kept you alive!

No Terran she had ever met properly appreciated their air, or saw their sky for what it was. In fact they very seldom looked at it.”

from 2312 by KSR