Exhibit
Future Stories of Community
About
Future Stories of Community is an interactive adaptation of Elizabeth Lane's graduate research conducted during her Master of Design studies at OCAD University. Elizabeth investigated: What is community, how has community evolved driven by emerging digital technology, and how might digital technology be designed to build healthy community?
Combining her experience in storytelling, futures, and technology, Elizabeth aims to create a space to gather and explore the intersection of community and digital technology.
Elizabeth acknowledges the biases that exist in this exhibit due to her own lived experience as a Western, privileged, educated, white woman influencing her work. During the research process, mitigation strategies were employed to help limit biases, including conducting primary research to gather diverse perspectives.
In 2022, while living in Arles, France as part of an autoethnographic research study on building community, Elizabeth was inspired by Ritual Inhabitual’s video installation, Rewe, at Rencontres Arles. Rewe interviews members of the Indigenous Mapuche community in Chile on the subject: how to live together?
Click here to read the full research report on OCAD University’s Open Research Repository.
Welcome to Future Stories of Community
Communities play a crucial role in individual and societal wellbeing, serving as a foundation for belonging and democracy.
Communities are evolving, expedited in today’s world by the abundance and rapid advancement of digital technology.
The impacts of digital technology on communities can be both positive, such as enabling global connections and support, and negative, such as heightening social fragmentation and polarization.
As digital technology continues its proliferation, it is important to understand how community health, and therefore societal health, could be impacted in the possible futures to come.
The year is 2043. You are invited to:
Explore four possible future worlds shaped by digital technology: Growth, Collapse, Discipline, and Transform.
Listen to fictional community members from each world share their own experiences with "community."
Imagine how we might preserve what is important for communities today in order to co-create healthy communities for the future amidst ever-changing environments.
Explore.
Listen.
Listen to stories from community members in the worlds of Growth, Collapse, Discipline, and Transform (listed in order of sequence).
Imagine.
How might we co-create healthy communities for the future? Consider what a “healthy” community means to you. What characteristics from your communities today would you want to remain the same and bring into 2043? What would you leave behind? What would you change in your community(ies) in 2043?
Contribute your ideas on the virtual whiteboard here.
Future Stories of Community was physically exhibited at OCAD University’s Graduate Gallery in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on November 10-12, 2023.
Future Stories of Community © 2023 by Elizabeth Lane is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.