methodological playgrounds
METHODOLOGICAL
PLAYGROUNDS

When the first picture of a blackhole was revealed in 2019, it represented a breakthrough for astronomy. However, shadowing this achievement/importance, memes flooded the internet with the image of the “disappointing” blurred ring. What instantly became an internet joke, actually showed us a glimpse of the unseeable. That very trivialized and trolling image, in reality, captured infinite visions of the astrological phenomenon.

In trying to analyze the current state of the pandemic and its imposing limitations on the triviality of daily routines, we turn to speculation as a tool for tapping through a myriad of seemingly inimaginable and unthinkable futures. This issue intends to reflect on the pandemic condition by creating an experimental chasm, denoting the gap between the future as thought and reality as experience. It does not wish to predict outcomes or prescribe solutions, but rather raise questions about possible futures through hyperbolizing the weak signals they’re founded upon—using futurology as a medium for the mind to roam free.

In the tradition of Dunne & Raby's practice, the fictional worlds and what-if scenarios resulting from speculating through design go beyond the discipline itself, borrowing from the methodological playgrounds of other fields in the process—and that is exactly our departure point. Through methodological playgrounds, design itself becomes a speculative and fictional ground—or a sandbox, if you may—to explore infinite visions. There is no straight line in futurology, and this sandbox of possibilities weighs in an interdisciplinary perspective as well as personal introspection, always producing different outcomes, rendering speculation as important as conventional methods of analysing one’s reality. From hyper-realities to dreams and alternative futures, it is through exploring the box of possibilities that we bring insight into this jarring black-hole of an experience that is the pandemic.

Hiatus Collective.




Notions of time and space are altered. A disease spanned the globe, and its consequences are unprecedented. We are witnesses to a Global Pandemic crisis. Putting on hold the debate on borders as a physical and geographic limit and its implying crises of identity and conflict, countries turned to fences and walls as a means to mitigate an inescapable quandary common to all worldwide. It is no novelty that millennials and Gen Z are characterised by distancing and alienation, but the new order imposed by the pandemic has imposed a revival of the "bedroom generation" in the post-digital era. Everything is reduced to the display screen and the simulated reality within it.

A digital magazine entitled RIFE—initially created within the discipline of Editorial Design in the MA of Communication Design at the Fine-Arts Faculty of Lisbon—emerged as a response to the pandemic condition and its global effects on the individual, social, political, ambiental and cultural levels, raising questions surrounding what we know as our reality at this day in age. These questions are made and answered by designers, now being opened to a greater spectrum of creatives. This is pertinent as we creatives operate within our contexts, and in order to render ethical alternatives to realities presented, we must investigate and understand them. At the moment we were quarantined, we were physically inhibited to circulate freely, so we turned to question how to circulate content digitally—not by option but by necessity—, thus revealing a doorway to cultural production in the digital world and simultaneously embracing the democratic distribution of the open source medium that is the internet.


RIFE Magazine — Issue 2, Methodological Playgrounds

Social Media Management
Beatriz Pinta 
Nádia Alexandre
Rafael Cavaquinho

Editorial Board
HIATUS COLLECTIVE

Project Orientation
Sofia Gonçalves

Operations Director
Nádia Alexandre

Creative Directors
HIATUS COLLECTIVE

Editing and Contents
HIATUS COLLECTIVE

Copy Editor
Beatriz Pinta

Webdesign
Mariana Cordeiro
Manuel Silva
Rafael Cavaquinho

Development
Mariana Cordeiro
Manuel Silva
Nádia Alexandre

Development Support
Rui Sampaio


DISCLAIMER
Collective HIATUS does not assume responsibility for the accuracy of all information. Reproduction of whole or in part of the published contents requires written permission from HIATUS.

RIFE Magazine believes in freedom of speech and thought thus, it does not exercise censorship on its contributors. Signed contributors do not necessarily represent the opinion of the collective HIATUS.

© 2020