Immersive experiments @ UNDP Eurasia’s Istanbul Innovation Days
2017, workshop, TUR/ EU
Role: Lead design and facilitation of immersive experiments, co-produced Zone of Experimentation
“Your excellent demos at the Zone of Experiment: Economic Science Fiction has set the tone and informed the agenda for a much-needed dialogue and action on the next generation of governance and peacebuilding in the digital age… Your work has certainly raised the discussion to an entirely different level and Anique’s approach to designing your ZoE has helped inform the design of others.”
Milica Begovic – Knowledge and Innovation Team Leader, UNDP Istanbul Regional Hub for Europe and the CIS
The Istanbul Innovation Days (IID) have become a well-known annual gathering of partners to explore and accelerate organizational learning about emerging trends and innovative approaches to development and policy making. For UNDP, IID have emerged as a central R&D mechanism to help rethink and challenge our work continuously and build a new generation of services with and for our partners and clients by incentivizing emerging initiatives and experiments around strategic issues. In 2018, the IID featuresd #NextGenGov, focusing on emerging global trends impacting governance mechanisms and approaches and aiming to contextualize their potential implications around the world through collaborative experimentation
The immersive experiments were offered as a kind of orienteering to the Economic Science Fiction Zone of Experiment (ZoX), opening space to translate speculation into application. The ZoX asked: Does ‘science fiction’ writing point to alternative ways of organizing resources and building new, just economic systems? What can we learn from speculative fiction about potential future economics? The session provides a platform and fertile environment for the exploration of the economic ideas in science fiction. Designed to cultivate conditions conducive for collaborative and self-guided experimentation in and beyond the event, the immersive experiments bridged the possible with the pragmatic to unleash a new kind of probable.