Yige Wang (going by 'IU'), a sociologist, presents the design of a new undergraduate course 'Toward a Social Science of Protocol,' structured around core theoretical lenses (functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism), micro-level linguistic/pragmatic protocols like Grice's cooperative principle, and macro-level historical analysis using Norbert Elias's 'The Civilizing Process' and Chinese vs. Western civilizational protocol divergence (protocol pluralism vs. protocol monoculture). She runs live interactive experiments with the audience (cross-disciplinary paraphrasing exercise, Zoom chat protocol-spotting) to demonstrate implicit versus explicit protocols in real time.
Topics
Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts (TAFs) are cryptic, haiku-like weather predictions produced continuously by meteorologists worldwide that directly inform pilot decisions and shape aviation operations at every scale. These terse textual protocols encode atmospheric phenomena and thresholds that determine individual actions, airport procedures, and global traffic patterns.
Matthew McDowell-Sweet
Samuel Chua of Seapunk Studios presents 'reverse-imagineering,' a methodology for protocol studies that starts from speculative fiction worlds and works backward to infer the protocols that would need to exist to make them plausible. He illustrates this through three Seapunk worlds—South(east Asia) with neoanimist distributed AI and 'ghost machine' commons-hardening, SNOW Society's shanzhai-inspired peer-to-peer climate adaptation supply chains, and the 67th World's longevity/automation governance where immortality requires earning social legitimacy—arguing that building fiction first surfaces protocol ideas that direct present-to-future design work would miss.
Samuel Chua
The Casio F-91W, a $14 plastic watch worn by everyone from Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden, exemplifies a design philosophy of \"unreasonable adequacy\"—meeting basic needs through durability, reliability, and ubiquity rather than sophistication. Its emergence as both a cultural icon and an object of security concern reveals how humble consumer gadgets become entangled with geopolitics, popular culture, and surveillance.
Timber Stinson-Schroff