IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 30

Figure 1. A version of Alex McDowell's research map, which is also adaptable to specific characters by placing the character at the
origin. Image Courtesy of Alex McDowell, 2016.

the current state of Makoko and its relationship to
Lagos with other members of the team, while also
collectively mapping and identifying specific aspects
of the research to understand whether it applied to
the individual, the community, the world, or to multiple scales. Our research was conducted through
articles, expert interviews, and media reviews and
analyses. After having built an ethnographic understanding of Makoko, we put the Makoko of 2016 into
conversation with our "world disruptors" of a future
self-sufficient Makoko: in terms of Internet, water, and
power. All of the students developed characters within our future Makoko, and we engaged in many different speculative fiction exercises to imagine what their
characters' lives are like in 2036, while remaining
attentive to each character's demands on the world
space, as well as the influence of the different scales
of the world on each character. Working from the
everyday individual scale, we imagined everything
from the contents of a character's purse, to their daily
routine from hour to hour. This bottom-up speculation then informed our understanding of the larger
world of Makoko, Lagos, and the world in 2036. Our
research has since continued to oscillate between
examining the larger "ecologies" of Makoko to examining the reciprocal effects of each character on
Makoko, and of Makoko on each character. At the topdown level, we divide our research areas into

domains and subdomains, which we continuously
investigate and reflect upon as a class.
In order to imagine the future of media in Makoko,
we workshopped for two classes solely on the topic of
media and its technology. During the first session, we
had an expert visitor, Bolaji Akran, a film producer
based in London and Lagos, help us to ground our perspective in his real-world experiences. In the second
class, we began with a discussion and launched into a
narrative exercise, which forms the heart of our article
here. Within this exercise, we asked each student to
answer the following six questions from the perspective
of their developed character:
■ How and where do you watch the equivalent of
a "film"?
■ How do you have a shared virtual reality or augmented reality experience?
■ What tech is your character carrying on them every day?
■ What is the smallest piece of tech that you own?
■ How is your favorite piece of tech powered?
■ What is your favorite piece of tech?
What follows are the student responses to each of
these questions, and a summary of what we learned
about the world of media in Makoko 2036 through their
answers, characters, and research. This unique
approach allowed us to create a nuanced picture of
media in 2036, developed through the lens of a site specific, ethnographic, and narrative design study.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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DECember 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016