prototyping social forms

Synthesis@ASU: Prototyping Social Forms

The social, economic, and ecological challenges we face are “wicked problems”, resistant to problem-solving approaches.  Divide and conquer approaches to a wicked problem can produce more wicked problems.  The only way to test an approach is to try it “for real”.   Indeed, people with incommensurate values addressing a complex situation like climate change or urban energy practices will reasonably disagree on what is the right thing to do.  And adding facts or data is unlikely to move the conversation.

Synthesis ateliers bring together individuals’ and business’ power to act in the world in a sandbox where impacted people, designers, expert makers, and decision-makers jointly re-imagine and assess social forms.  We build a knowledge enterprise for prototyping at lifescale the lived, whole experience of places, events, or infrastructures.  Combining artistic and engineering techniques for creating augmented experiences, we can prototype homes, streets, parks and playgrounds, together with finance, governance, energy systems to the degree needed to get a sense of what it would be like to actually live with those forms.   Using experiential methodologies the Synthesis ateliers will non-reductively and adaptively assess how people experience technologies, products, services in plausible, live social settings.

Projects range from urban heat infrastructures and steerable weather simulations to movement-based responsive environments, and mating “cafe tables” between Montreal and Phoenix. 

https://www.ted.com/talks/xin_wei_sha_i_we_world

http://synthesiscenter.net

https://building21.ca/prototyping-social-forms

PSF slides