Tutorials & Group Meetings

We had an intriguing and heated conversation during tutorials and group meetings this week that made me go straight out of my comfort zone both in format and content. In format, the discussion was increasingly intense which made previous tutorials, while equally intriguing, seem pretty quiet by comparison, everybody was blurting out new ideas in a relatively short amount of time, and I had to literally fight to cut into the conversation, which was surprisingly very enjoyable because I got to listen to different people’s perspectives on the same topic and try to add my individual ideas into the mix.

In content, I was really excited when we touched on the work-life balance(or imbalance when it comes to the Asian countries) because it directly linked to result-based culture (from education to work) which is something I had personal triggers on. As our group members all came from Asian countries, the education we received was more or less result-oriented, which led to us, as well as the majority of Asian workers, to compete in whatever field we are in because we have less resources compared to our Western counterparts. Asian workers have much longer labouring hours than European workers in the same company, and Asians have to adapt to the European schedules due to the time difference. We concluded this phenomenon as colonization in the modern era, comparing this macroscopic view to the caste system in India.

REadings

We focused on the theory of speculative thinking this week and were advised to bring the theory of science fiction into our projects. The real world is swaying on a pendulum between utopia and dystopia(depending on what angle you are looking at) and speculating on the past as well as the future really helps us to define the scenario at hand.

To me the episode Nosedive in Black Mirror really linked to our topic, because it was an exaggerated version of the labels of real society nowadays and its impact on people are quite accurately described. Personally I’m still contemplating how to use speculative thinking as a muscle to make our audience aware of the macroscopic truth that we are about to understand, reveal and possibly change. Because Asian and European labourers that are inside this scenario won’t necessarily see the bigger picture unless they see a model of a similar story where they are outside the 4th wall.

The Next Step

Our next step is to find global corporate companies(so that they consist of both Western and Eastern workers and they are working in an office so that we delete the possible comparisons caused by harsher environments) and contact them for additional information. We aim to compare the routine of workers from both areas and seek out a speculative parallel world, either showing a more perfect utopia or highlighting the injustice in a dystopia.