04. After the Happy End
The After the Happy End workshop draws inspiration from Alice in Wonderland, using imagination as a tool to explore and investigate issues that emerged from reading the book, such as identity, housing, personal freedoms, the concept of time, and education.
Through foresight techniques, participants are invited to design a new world in 2222, considering the impacts of climate change, technology, social inequalities, and other factors. The workshop incorporates speculative design methods to strengthen foresight capacity and the development of posssible future scenarios. The workshop took place at the Athens Science Festival in 2022, organized by the Futures Collective Project, consisting of Costas Bissas, Eugenia Antoniou, Vassilis Xenofontos, and myself.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
The result of a collective exercise in creative imagination.
Lucy was in the zero-gravity training hall in space. Only three days remained before her very first mission. Suddenly—bang! A strange sound echoed. Lucy bit her lip from pain and disappointment. A flashing signal lit up, reading: “Severe fracture”, while a cold voice announced: “Leg terminated.”
With great effort and a heavy heart, Lucy dragged herself to the experimental post-healing garden. There, she picked a fruit—not just any fruit, but the very one that Johnny, the gardener-doctor robot, had once shown her.
Except that Johnny had done a reset that day. The fruit Lucy chose was not meant to heal fractures, but…
Lucy looked down.
At the site of her pain, a brand-new leg had just sprouted.
And so, instead of a setback, the accident turned into an advantage: before long, Lucy became the champion of space levitation.
