EricHunting

Are you familiar with any educational efforts for the refugees? There are many children and young people who have had their educations disrupted and many adults who will need help in integrating into the new communities they are entering. I have been floating the concept lately of recruiting the fab lab/Maker communities in developing pop-up schools/libraries/data centers for refugee camps as well as concepts like mobile outdoor education using things like pop-up blackboards, cheriyal scrolls, and kamishibai. (portable theaters based on bicycles once a tradition in Japan)

How does one address the decline of the written word as a medium for communicating ideas and the related decline in access to means of illustration for the non-artist?

We live in a culture now highly biased in favor of visual communication. People--professionals especially--react to any text longer than a tweet like a fussy child before a plate of asparagus. Crowdfunding/crowdsourcing demands video and elaborate graphic presentation. Any moderately sophisticated idea demands a comic book or whiteboard animation to explain it. Yet access to illustration has declined with the obsolescence of commercial illustration by cheap reprographics and photography for ad copy use. Illustration has been relegated to a handful of niche uses such as comics and children's books. Artists and designers no longer seem to regard illustration as a basic medium of communication, focusing on style over content, narrowing their fields of subject, and no longer collaborate with non-artists outside their small communities. We've seen the impact of this with the slow decline of futurist literature, where one simply cannot photograph what doesn't yet exist. Today's futurists struggle to communicate with the mainstream society and Hollywood, with its antiscience and compulsive dystopianism, dominates the cultural discourse on the future because no one else can afford the art.

The technology of CGI has so far proven no help, even as it has become the new standard for many forms of illustration. Computer modeling is not automation of art. It's highly inefficient because it's not drawing, it's model-making, and incurs about the same labor overhead as actual model fabrication. It offers no substitute for talent and cannot compete in efficiency with simple drawing.

As an amateur futurist aspiring toward a career, I personally have had any number of projects stymied by the illustration problem. The written word is dead but it's my only tool. What can I do?

If one wanted to create a new and international TMRC around amateur space telerobotics, where would one go for help?