Tom Joyes workshop

• represent words differently - using Youtube search 
• design on demand
• ideas and research
• Black Mirror - use objects to make story convincing
• Dunne & Raby
• Critical Mass (Jonas Lund)
• Alan Warburton (Spectacle, speculation, spam)
• brass eye (spoof comedy show)

BRIEF
1 GENERATING
Designers will form groups of three. Each group will receive a random output from the ‘Possible Futures’ generator consisting of a fictional three word term.

2 DREAMING
Each group will speculate on the possible meanings, situations, conditions and politics of their fictional term. Think of the term as a window into another reality/time and the scenarios surround it. Start with a basic understanding of the term and then let your minds wander whilst collecting visual references.

3 INVENTING
Each group will then prototype an artefact that exists in their speculative scenario. This could be an object, product, invention, film, text, policy, game, poster, piece of technology, etc. Think how this artefact can be politically motivated—what stories is it telling us? Experiment with aesthetics and use your repertoire as communicators to convince, seduce and confuse.

4 (CON)FUSING
Collectively, the artefacts will form the ‘Museum of Fictions’—objects of possible and impossible futures. There will be no formal review.

think about vernacular, language makes it more believable
work within your means (e.g. webcam would look more real than SLR photos)

PSEUDO ILLEGAL COMPLEX

PSEUDO

• fake, not genuine
• pretentious or insincere

ILLEGAL

• contrary to or forbidden by law
• criminal law 

COMPLEX

• complicated, involving many parts
• a related group of repressed or partly repressed emotionally significant ideas which cause psychic conflict leading to abnormal mental states or behaviour. (giving someone a complex)
• building complex (interconnected structures)

IDEAS

• Glasses - see the world as illegal (using psychology)
• Advertising campaign for drug that gives you ability to do illegal things legally
• Model doll house (eg. drug dealers mansion) (look at the Miniaturist)
• police brutality 

We began looking at the word complex and a subject that sprang to mind was a superiority complex. Combining this with the word 'illegal' made us think of police and the ever growing issue of police brutality.

We collected some imagery of police, riots, brutality etc. and decided to let the process guide our outcome.

Police brutality is becoming more and more of an issue, particularly brutality against black people. The Black Lives Matter movement, an uprising against the systematic racism shown towards African American people made headlines in 2017 after many black people were killed unnecessarily by officers of the law in the US.

The aspect I wanted to focus on more than anything was the unnecessary killings, ones that had happened sparked from a ridiculous reason. A high profile case is one Eric Garner, who was choked to death after an altercation with an officer over cigarettes. Another even more unreasonable case came about when a police officer body slammed a girl in a classroom of a school.
Inspired by this 'unreasonable' aspect we began to look at ridiculous laws to base our outcome on. This also links to 'PSEUDO' and 'ILLEGAL' in terms of a law being so ridiculous that it must not be real (pseudo). 

One law I found that I really liked was the law that it is illegal to flush a toilet past 10pm in Switzerland as it is considered noise pollution. Of course doing this would not warrant a visit from the police, and certainly not any brutality but that was the point we wanted to highlight - how ridiculous police brutality has become.

We decided to make a gif acting out this scenario. Creating a storyboard for the gif gave us an idea of what we wanted in each frame, as well as the overall layout and elements of the story.

Final product:

I am really happy with the outcome of this workshop as I think we looked in depth at the words given to us and explored a variety of directions. Any direction we would have chosen would've been really interesting to develop further, particularly the advertising campaign for a drug. However I am glad we chose this direction as it brings into the spotlight a world issue. Tom agreed with this, saying that he was happy we took the concept and abstracted it as far as we did because it isn't a concept that springs to mind immediately but after a bit of thought you can see the connection clearly.