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Minority Reports from 2054: Building Collective and Critical Forecasting Imaginaries via Afrofuturetypes and Game Jamming

2018; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 39; Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/topia.39.03

1916-0194

Lonny J. Avi Brooks, Ian Pollock,

Teaching and Learning Programming

Imagined affordances reflect the imagined applications that users have for technology compared with what designers intend, including their own values and expectations that inform these imagined actions. For our purposes, imagined affordances enable black people in the diaspora to strive for affirmation within hostile environments that have accompanied slavery and its traumatic aftermath. This article presents pedagogical research in speculative black futurism, turning to our Minority Reports 2054 Game Jam, first held at California State University, East Bay in spring 2017, as a model for forecasting Afrofutures. In our forecasting pedagogy, we ask students from marginalized working-class communities to reimagine their social, media and digital spaces into the year 2054—the imagined year for the film Minority Report—thereby highlighting the “minority reports” of future visions too often ignored. We explain the forecasting processes developed for systematically imagining viable black futures by revisiting ancient black cultural rituals, such as the Brazilian adaptation of the African Kongo cosmogram. We also meld the latest methodological tools for scanning future trends to reposition them as “Afrofuturetypes” that trace past, present and future. Afrofuturetypes describe the building exercises of and outcomes via the Game Jam, whereby students create socially interactive games that aim to generate stories of 2054 with black futures in mind.