Vorlesungsverzeichnis

Suchen Sie hier über ein Suchformular im Vorlesungsverzeichnis der Leuphana.

Veranstaltungen von Postdoc Lydia Jørgensen

Lehrveranstaltungen

Speculating organizational futures (Seminar)

Inhalt: The seminar aims to provide students with an understanding of, and investigating, speculative design as organizational future making Within organization studies a.o. strategy has been know as a way for organizations to deal with the future, or as Kornberger says stategy reflects ‘a peculiar technology to discipline the future’ (2013: 104). Recent discourses on e.g. digital transformation, sustainability and geopolitical changes stress the future as hard to determine and openended. These approaches address future making as an organizational phenomena and practice (Comi and Whyte, 2018; Wenzel et al., 2020). Drawing on process philosophy and practice theory, this implies that practices of future making take part in enacting the future and may do so through performative materializations of organizational futures. Centering on speculative design and prototypin, the seminar seeks to explore critical design thinking a practice of future making and a way of advancing materializations of organizational futures. Speculative design has emerged as an approach that seeks to imagine alternative futures as a way to engage critically with complex societal and organizational matters. It does so by combining design thinking, artistic research and social science approaches. Through speculative prototyping ways to imagine and materialize how things, systems and behaviors could be different than what they are today are persued by asking ‚what if?’ or ‚what might have been, if?‘. As such the aim is not to predict the future, but to critically consider what futures could be or become. Rather it means critically engaging with how existing assumptions, values and behaviors could be different by creatively investigating and exploring everyday cultures and practices. A well known example of speculative design, is the development of Apples first iPhone. Here Speculative Design was used to radically re-think the role of technology in everyday life, rather than ‚just‘ develop a new phone, which has in many ways has fundamentally changed the digital practices in society. Working with selected, relevant approaches to organizational future making and speculative design in particular, students will learn to critically address organizational futures through speculative design and prototyping. For the purposes of this seminar, speculative design and prototyping is not seen as just a method to be applied, but as a speculative method that is ‘a situated becoming-with the researched’ (Wilkie, 2018: 348) and presents ‘critical thought translated into materiality’ (Dunne and Raby, 2013: 35). As such students will be asked to engaged with an experimental approach to method, that further reflects an epistemic orientation emphasising performativity and entanglement. The seminar will zoom in on approaches to speculative design and prototyping, and it endeavours to ‘test’ their applicability and potency in organizational future making. To do so, the seminar will introduce selected recent debates on organizational future making and speculative design, which reflect underlying ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions. By focusing on organization, the seminar seeks to tap into how speculative design can be a way to critically inquire into and research organizational futures and everyday organizing. Based on these debates, students will be asked to conduct a small fieldwork on everyday organization and organizing, which builds the ground for exploring organizational futures through developing speculative prototypes upon their material and findings. To do that, the seminar will work with speculative design approaches and experiment with speculative prototyping throughout the session in the seminar.