Infrastructures of the imagination: building new worlds in media, art, & design

This dissertation explores how we can both imaginatively and practically build another world, another future. Infrastructures of the imagination means using imaginative techniques to design new cities that are sustainable, pluralistic, and democratic. It also involves building better infrastructures for everyday citizens to collaboratively participate in the process of envisioning, designing, testing, and implementing the future. By working directly with everyday citizens and urban residents, designers not only gain novel ideas but also develop a diversity of conceptual models for development. ❧ The chapters within this dissertation lay out an interdisciplinary theory and history of media arts, technologies, and urban designs related to the collaborative creation of alternative futures, utopic impulses, and political interventions. The analyses showcase a spectrum of forms, from time-based media (film, games, and VR) to place-based designs (mobile media, community art, and urbanism), in order to reveal a range of complementary and overlapping strategies. In addition to historical examples, I weave in my own ongoing community-driven speculative design projects in order to ground the more theoretical discussions and provide pragmatic methodologies and lessons learned. The final dissertation research stems from six years of community engagement work in South Los Angeles, in the historic African-American music and arts neighborhood of Leimert Park. My co-researchers and I have facilitated teams of community members and university students to create a range of real and speculative urban designs tied to local culture. In the final chapter, I provide a methodological and theoretical framework for “anticipatory design” in order for other practitioners and researchers to gain insights for their own ongoing and future projects. ❧ Infrastructures of the imagination is not about imagination in a pure whimsical sense, but is rooted in real-world issues and wicked problems, problems such as gentrification, affordability, and sustainability. These problems are multifaceted and require a diverse collaboration across disciplines, generations, cultures, and ethnicities. By working in conjunction, we are able to bring unique insights and expertise that complement one another and create more holistic solutions for building a better future.