Lucy Suchman, Pelle Ehn, and myself were asked to give a keynote at 4S/EASST 2012 and created a collaborative performance, The Design Mailboat.
We were inspired by island ‘mailboats’ that were letters-in-a-bottle placed on a tide to carry messages between islanders around the world.
The Design Mailboat was a letter exchange between the Future Archaeologist (Laura Watts in Scotland), the Anthropologist of Technoscience (Lucy Suchman in Silicon Valley USA) and the Collective Designer (Pelle Ehn in Sweden). In the performance, we exchanged messages about our different versions of ‘design’ and its futures from our different locations.
Published Version
We turned the letters into a book chapter, the Prologue to Making Futures: Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy edited by Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson and Richard Topgaard, and published by MIT Press. The book is available to read under Creative Commons open access license.