Zingiber’s TABoMB
Zingiber’s TABoMB
Bringing Crip Futures, a critical disability perspective, to the discussion of time and productivity
Faculty Lead:
Laura Forlano
Teaching Assistant:
Hendriana Werdhaningsih
Class:
Designing Futures
Project Team:
Julia Rochlin
Prachi Saxena
Over fourteen weeks, the Designing Futures class explored different theoretical lenses to propose artifacts, narratives, and fictions as provocations. Over the last seven weeks, our team took on a crip futures lens, allowing us to propose new ways of embodying time and to problematize the dominant narrative of time and efficiency that permeates our society today.
Zingiber’s TaBoMB imagines a future world where the capitalist-ableist culture, absorbed by its desire for control, precision, and productivity, develops hyper-precise bionic timekeeping aids that reshape all forms of life.
This project is a narrative-based design fiction developed by querying the modern trajectory of time-based technoscience. It draws inspiration from Crip Futures, an expression of critical disability theory. Our work raised the following questions for the audience to consider:
What are the common assumptions about time and timekeeping that are enforced on us in our daily lives?
How might we crip time in our day-to-day life? Or is that an exercise in futility?
How do clocks and other tools change our perception of time?
What relation do space, place, and culture have to time?
If you want to learn more about this work, click here.
Crip time (n)
“Crip Time requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and bodies…Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”
—Alison Kafer, ‘Feminist, Queer, Crip’
Crip time (v)
“Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings.”
—Ellen Samuels, ‘Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time’
“One of the most rewarding and unchartered elements of this work was actually transposing the theory that inspired us into its final form. We had spent so much time reading thought-bending postulations of writers such as Alison Keefer and inspired blogs of embodied living, that we had worked ourselves into a corner.
We found ourselves abstracting far away from the kernel of the insights that inspired us - such was the affordance of storytelling. After we collaborated with an illustrator to make some of our imaginings come to life, our design evolved and we learned as the process guided us!
We don’t think we succeeded entirely; in fact, we are displaying the work to expose its shortcomings. We embrace our report as a deeper delving into the literature that inspired us and informed this work.”— Prachi Saxena