Ancient Future Technology
Course design & visual assets for MAS.S68 Fall 2021
David Kong, Michelle Chang, Arunav Konwar, Bob Hendrikx
Contributions: Teaching assistant; visual design; course design; social media operations
Overview
MAS.S68 Ancient Future Technology is a seminar that ran during the 2021 fall semester at the MIT Media Lab to a select group of registered students across Harvard and MIT, and committed global listeners. The premise of this course was to investigate how ancient cultural and scientific practices might harmonize with cutting edge technologies like synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. As part of a group of research affiliates at David Kong’s Community Biotechnology Initiative, I helped design the course curriculum and suggest pertinent weekly topics and speakers. I also owned the visual design language and branding for the class, conceived of and ran the class social media accounts (Medium, Instagram), and was one of two core teaching assistants who ran day-to-day logistics and interfaced with students.
What do we mean by Ancient Future Technology?
Scientific practice is inseparable from the ways in which we choose to represent and understand the world. From indigenous land management that honors nature spirits, to Traditional Chinese Medicine which visualizes the body as an ecosystem, to Japanese robotics aimed at producing artificial companions — our diverse cultural identities, norms, and values intimately shape how science and technology is developed, applied and accepted. At a time when the quest for ethical standards has become a shared concern for many scientific communities, we believe it is important to challenge prevalent science-culture distinctions and develop a more holistic, intercultural perspective to redefine ethics and engineering philosophy for the age of global participation.
“Ancient Future Technology” is, all at once, a hypothesis, question (or many a question, really), and an ethos, touching upon themes as diverse as the importance of storytelling, gifts versus commodities, reciprocity with nature, and the changing meaning of the sacred in the present world. How do we, as designers, engineers, and researchers, realize or manifest values in society that are harmonious with nature? What will our future gardens be like? What world views, values, and ways of knowing drive the behaviors and technologies we see manifested today? And what kind of ancestors do we want to be? Ancient Future Technology is about revisiting the millennia of virtues and wisdom embedded in traditions across the world, and reflecting on how these might inform the future of scientific, design, and engineering practice.
Visual Design
