In March 2026 I launched ten video essays called The Mundania Files. The videos are the core of a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that I produced for Lund University as part of a collaboration with Coursera. The videos are also used for workshops and as a resource for collaborative reflection, idea generation and discussion.
Below is the first video (called Intro). It starts with a presentation of the Mundania-concept. The following videos each bring up a concept, which it revolves around.
This is how The Mundania Files-course is decribed.as part of the MOOC:
Welcome to The Mundania Files, an experimental course and a proposal to imagine differently about emerging technologies and the everyday.
To better understand the transformative power of technologies such as AI over time, we need to know more how emerging technologies are incessantly and gradually enmeshed in everyday life. We need to scrutinize what we normally ignore, and to challenge how we imagine novel as well as earlier technologies.
The Mundania Files will offer new approaches to understand the role of emerging and transformative technologies, and how they move from buzz, hype and matters of concern to a faint often unnoticed background hum.
The course can be seen as a creative sandbox where you will find fuel for thought, and inspiration to imagine differently about the futures of AI, emerging technologies and everyday life. Our conceptual anchor in this will be ideas about Mundania.
We will start with the small and the seemingly trivial, but also with unexpected examples, to examine how technologies gradually become ordinary. We will also approach larger issues with the aim to circumvent simplistic pro-con positions and prevailing assumptions about the futures of AI.
Positions and debates are often strongly influenced by the buzz and hype surrounding the most recent applications and variations of technologies, such as Generative AI (in 2026). We will engage with the concept of Mundania to dismantle entrenched positions in contemporary debates. But you will also be encouraged to pose new questions and to analyse the futures of technologies from your own specific horizon. All in all, the aim is to energize how to imagine AI and everyday life, as well as to think critically and constructively about these matters.