Issues

This exact question, what is human and what does it mean to be human, beats at the heart of speculative creativity and science fiction. Authors, film-makers, game designers, artists, poets, all playing on the edge, examining the boundaries, exploring the frontiers. What is the demarcation line between man and machine, beast and monster; between natural and artificial, cultured and wild; between the living and the dead, the dead-yet-alive, the undead; what differentiates human from trans-, post- and superhuman, non-human, foreign, alien, demonic and divine.

We tend to take our homes for granted. Over the past year our homes became frontlines in a covert war. We took shelter. We added much more meaning to our homes, while meaning was being eroded. Who are the political forces that are trying to change our relationship with our home? For over a century The Uncanny was a professional term used in a few specific disciplines: psychology, sociology, robotics and animation. It seldom made it into idle conversation. Nowadays – everyone, everywhere, is talking about it. We’ve all experienced in the flesh the unsettling feeling of the strangely familiar, the unheimlich. The Uncanny is all around us – in our haunted homes, beaming from our screens, in the streets – emptied out, now strangely revitalized, our cities, muted and mutated. It’s in the fabric of everyday life, in the sudden strangeness of daily routines. A fear not triggered by alienation, not external… A fear coming from inside the house! In this issue we explore both the Uncanny and the home, and their strange relationship these days. Don’t be afraid to dive in and join us!

The Designing Tomorrow/s Handbook to Desirable Futures discusses the importance of speculative approaches in today’s data-driven society and presents different methodologies, from speculative design, backcasting to games design as well as use cases.

2 meters (6 feet) of distance. 14 days of isolation. “A good outcome would be 250,000 deaths”. A two billion dollars aid package. How do we talk about the new uncanny numbers and foreign scales that became our reality in the past few months? In what way does the plague, which we’re now in the midst of, exposes the failures of our human perception of the world and our limitations of imagination? Would we learn to look at nature, industry, economy, urbanism, and our place within all of these processes from a new perspective? Or rather, will the limitations of our perception survive this crisis as well?