STS Tarot Decks: A Hands-On Approach To Critically Imagining The Future

• In Event: Making & Doing Central Exhibition I

Abstract

Our STS tarot cards are based off of the Creative Anticipatory Reasoning Framework (York and Conley 2020). They play on oracular traditions to help us encounter and actively re-orient our worlds. (cf. Martin Holbraad’s 2012 work on oracular practices.) Drawing from Winner’s “Technologies As Forms of Life,” participants will use thematic decks of cards (Space Habitation, Gene Editing, Waste/Trash issues, etc) to time travel 25 years into the future. They will be guided through a backtracking exercise aiming to relate the steps that led to that future from the present, and they will also be encouraged to deepen their capacities as critical futurologists and imagineers by creating artifacts (anything from stick figures to clay models to VR and beyond) to assess the forms of life in the imagined future. Particular attention will be paid to reflecting on differential changes with respect to the fundamental justice and sustainability of future societies, focusing on above all to how even attractive innovations may exclude some from flourishing, unleashing novel forms of social and ecological injustice which may, with proper anticipation, be mitigated. At the end of the session participants will be invited to design their own STS tarot decks.

Authors

• Shannon N. Conley, James Madison University

• Elizabeth A. Reddy, Colorado School Of Mines

• Brad Tabas, ENSTA Bretagne

• Brenda Trinidad

• Toluwalogo Odumosu, James Madison University

• Damien Patrick Williams, University of North Carolina at Charlotte