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Under New Suns: Rethinking How We Teach Technology

  • Aug 12
  • 5 min read


A mantis shrimp can see nine more spectrums of light than humans can. Not 9 more colours, 9 more spectrums. 🤯 Their experience of the world is fundamentally different from ours. Because of that, and a number of other factors (see Mantis Shrimp fun facts in foot notes), if they were developing technology, they would do so in fundamentally different ways, for different means, than us.


This is an important starting point for thinking about technology: technology doesn't emerge in a vacuum. It emerges from the particular ways we experience, understand, and imagine the world.


Media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously described this relationship in his seminal 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man: “All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.”


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Our tools extend what our bodies and minds can already do. We build ways to see farther, hear more, remember longer, communicate across distance, move faster, calculate more quickly, and eventually perceive and manipulate things that were once beyond our senses entirely.


Yet STEM/STEAM and technology education often begins somewhere much further down the road. We learn what a technology does, how it works, or who invented it—but not always the human fascination, cultural conditions, scientific discoveries, and creative impulses that made someone want to build it in the first place.


That context matters.


We aren't talking about the history of technology as a collection of dates, inventors, and artifacts in a computer museum, or a Wikipedia page about the people who developed AI. We're interested in the much bigger story: the human desire to extend ourselves into the world, and the science, culture, and circumstances that shape what we build.


At LitKit, we believe this is an essential starting point for technology education. When learners can connect the technologies they encounter today to the larger longview human context spanning time from ancestors to descendants, they begin to ask better questions regarding the applications and implications of technology, ranging from design to ethics.


How could we use this? How could it be improved? What else could it make possible? And perhaps most importantly: Should we use it this way at all?


LitKit puts technology into context as both a media experience and a maker experience. Our immersive storytelling experiences take learners on a time-bending journey through human history, presenting moments that reveal the mix of science, culture, and context that shapes the development of technology. So that learners can fully understand: What is the same?; What is different?; and What is possible?


We call this framework Past, Present, and Possible.


Past:

The persistence of vision is the science behind our experience of moving images. There is essentially a lag between our eyes and brain that result in us seeing a sequence of images as continuous movement. Inside our ALL ABOUT GIFS animation kit, makers unlock an interactive, 3D digital diorama featuring our "40,000-year-old cat GIF." Here, learners discover how our ancestors drew ancient animals on cave walls in ways that were thought to be experienced as moving images by the flickering torchlight, much like a modern lenticular (example below of 3D postcard image. Note the popular lenticular subject matter of big cats as perhaps another connection to shared interests with our anscestors). It reminds us that our fascination with the Persistence of Vision is as old as human eyes. Humans we have had a fascination with this phenomena, and a desire to experience moving images/time-based media, long before the advent of film or video, or even the photograph. The interest that sparked these inventions are deeply human.



Present:

Each LitKit includes an augmented reality-powered postcard that introduces them to a living artist or technologist actively making a living in that medium. Instead of studying abstract technical manuals, learners meet contemporary culture producers who are experimenting with technologies and tools that reflect and shape contemporary culture and current applications of tech. We’re interested in introducing them to humans collaborating with machines and software, exploring the boundaries, uses, and misuses of technological developments, rather than corporations. What are the people using these technologies right now observing about their capabilities and limitations, and what they make possible?



Possible:

To round out the experience, each LitKit comes with a 3rd AR-powered collectible: a futurist poster. This poster portrays each kit's tech theme in the near future, demonstrating a protopian view of how this technology might evolve in the short term. A future curious creatives like themselved will occupy, as adults and professionals. Rather than leaning into a dystopian nightmare of machine dominance or a utopian fantasy of an unachievable paradise, our representations of tech futures are strictly protopian. We define protopian world-building as the practice of imagining and creating representations of possible near futures as a form of collective participation in becoming. Through stories, art, media, prototypes, and other forms of cultural production, we explore how people, technologies, cultures, and systems might coexist and evolve. By imagining futures we would want to inhabit—and exploring the choices, relationships, values, and responsibilities they require—we begin to rehearse and participate in bringing them into being.



New Suns, Same Horizon


The legendary speculative fiction author Octavia Butler famously wrote:


“There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”


Technology may change dramatically, but the human impulses behind it are remarkably consistent. We are still trying to see farther, communicate across greater distances, make sense of the invisible, extend our memories, move images through time, and understand—and reshape—the world around us.


The tools change. The materials change. The cultural context changes. But the motivations remain.


By putting media technology into its historical and societal context, we can show makers that old and new technologies aren't separate, isolated entities. They are part of a much longer story: evolving, interconnected, and deeply human expressions of how we experience and imagine the world.


And the story doesn't end with the technology we have today.


At LitKit, we're not just interested in teaching young people how to use the technologies of the present. We're interested in giving them the context and creative tools to empower them to reinvent tech futures, under entirely new suns.



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