The Cloud and The Protagonist A 2 day workshop with the 4th year Product Design students at Glasgow School of Art. Exploring how design can be used to generate alternative futures and frame debates around the psychological social, cultural and ethical consequences of technology, in particular cloud computing, With the use of a range of protagonists collected from a selection of newspaper articles, in pairs, students were asked to use their design skills to not specifically solve problems but imagine how these protagonists would use cloud computing to satisfy their desires. How might they use cloud computing for propaganda? gang membership? money laundering? blagging? vigilantism? Applications and scenarios included; gang territory virtual tagging indicators , veilbook app for burka wearers, the ministry of facial distribution for deceased dictators, utopian mormon clouds, stolen goods ebay, scientologist sponsored criminal database, story generators for blaggers, pigeon spys, mormon virtual wives... Images from the workshop were generated by the 4th year students: http://www.gsa.ac.uk/gsa.cfm?pid=130

1. THE CLOUD AND
THE PROTAGONIST
TWO DAY WORKSHOP
BA PRODUCT DESIGN
GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART

2. THE CLOUD AND THE PROTAGONIST
How might citizens/people/cults/societies take advantage of cloud
computing to address their own complicated pleasures and fears? How
might their belief systems be embodied into the functions of a cloud
computing service they might create?
In pairs choose an article and design a service/application for the
protagonist involved or design the product or service they would build
themselves - if they could build cloud computing application themselves
what would they do to satisfy their desires? How would these different
people use the cloud?