Drones and Dreams
Commissioned by Digital Asia Hub, Hong Kong
and the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University
January 2019
Scope of Work
Design for a 210 pages digital and print publication.
Download the eBook here
Team
Edited by Amy Johnson, Produced by Malavika Jayaram
About the client
The Digital Asia Hub is an independent, non-profit Internet and society research think tank based in Hong Kong. Incubated by The Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a diverse group of academic, civil society, and private sector partners, the Hub provides a non-partisan, open, and collaborative platform for research, knowledge sharing and capacity building related to Internet and Society issues with focus on digital Asia.
About the project
Drones and Dreams, a publication from the Digital Asia Hub collects the outputs of a two-day speculative fiction–writing workshop held in Singapore in December 2018 as part of Digital Asia Hub’s ‘AI in Asia’ series. This workshop was the original speculative sprint, designed to produce all of the material for a collection in just two intensive days. The final output of the workshop was a set of new speculative pieces of fiction, imagining our technological future, generated by the participants.
Based on a two day sprint on speculative futures, the book was a collection of short stories and ‘fragments’ which were quick responses to prompts, and not meant to be consumed as polished, finished pieces. The team of participants speculated on possible futures with cities and infrastructure, food, bodies and bots, piracy and credit and time.
Attending the workshop was just interesting as designing the final product, and I wanted the design to reflect the energy of the two day sprint. The book took on dreamy colours in soft pastels, with boxy typography that was in sharp contrast.
For the cover, I put into visuals one of the discussions that had fuelled the participants collective imagination- what might the vending machine of the future look like? Would paper money still be relevant? Would your data and purchasing power simply be linked to biometrics or a retina scan? What products would the vending machine sell? Products that could reverse time? A pill that would instantly provide nutrition and satiate you? Contact lenses to avoid retina scans and preserve anonymity temporarily? A pill for a great idea, or for a burst of happiness? And would everyone have equal access to these products?
I illustrated each individual products packaging, interspersing these through the fragments in the second part of the book. The fragments were designed to be read as work-in-progress. Unfinished pieces. I used visible frames and symbols from typesetting tools to create a visual language that would support this.
