What I personally found the most beneficial thing from this unit was that it gave us an opportunity to engage with speculative design and speculative thinking in a very interesting way, to the point where the product that we were creating actually seemed like a real engine for change making. It also helped me in explore working with people who were from a different discipline than myself, who I have now bonded very well with. The image is the brochure which we put out on the day of our presentation to show the new product which we created.
This project has made me aware of we can use design for the good, another book with coincided with this was “Discursive Design” by Bruce Tharp, which talks about designing for social change. Hence In the ongoing projects I will undoubtedly be carrying on the things that I have learnt from this experience, such to trust the process and be more mindful about the feedback I receive.
After assembling most of our artifacts it was time for the Project Labs. It was vital for us to get contrasting perspectives and feedback on the idea of the brain chips. As we collected our feedback it was clear that not many people were willing to conform to a lifestyle where brain chips were mandatory. This made us look at the flaws in the system which we were proposing.
It personally also made me look at the flaws in my own designing of the comics as they were not as effective in conveying the ideas I wanted them to convey. We got feedback from tutors about how this technology might already exist and to think more about how we were yet to look at this scenario from a speculative way of thinking, to do that I decided to look at this book called “The age of surveillance capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff, which explains how surveillance capitalism is profiting from analyzing behavioral data and is on the verge of dominating our future.
The major flaw in our work was, the fact that we had designed a product which was not creating an impact in any way, it was not taking systems of care into account and, most importantly, it was not touching upon mental health and its significance, something which we all felt strongly for. Hence we decided to change our idea a little, and design a product which is actually for good and will genuinely make lives of the people using it better, which is when we came up with the idea of BUD, an non-invasive ingestible pill which monitors health through the gut, which had a very positive reception in our final presentation.
To proceed ahead we all divided work amongst ourselves depending on what skills and strengths we all had. I had taken up the responsibility of creating a few comics and the brochure which would be given to our audience on the presentation day.
It was a bit intimidating to get into the comic making process as I did not have any experience in that area and it took some time but, as I progressed ahead with visualizing the scenarios which we had created it became easier to communicate those ideas, to highlight the disparity between the classes which were created by a non-human object. The idea which I had for the comic was to complement the video we were creating by showcasing contrasting perspectives. I can certainly say that I will be willing to work more with this medium in the future, and be more open to exploring different visual art forms. The artifacts which we decided on were the comics, an advertisement video for the chip, and a diary belonging to a character from the future.
After figuring what we wanted to make as our future work, we then had to tone it down and reach a scenario, we decided to create a shared document where we all created a more concrete base for our scenarios and put them in writing.
One of the scenarios which I wrote when I started noting my ideas down was where all the workers in an office have been replaced by servers and machines to process information, and the servers are now sitting inside the cubicles where the workers used to sit, yet the head office (pun-inteded), was housing a huge 3D printed brain to monitor and generate ideas for the server. This scenarios is meant to portray that despite machines taking over the jobs of workers, a human touch is still necessary in work as these machines where after all created by the ideas of a human. brain and need instructions on where to go. When I explained my ideas to my team mates, they encouraged me to put this scenario visually as it could be possibly used by us during our work on this project and at the same time also shows my personal views on the issue at hand. This image was created by me with the help of license free vector drawings and Autodesk sketchbook software.
After our visit to the Market, our group regrouped and decided to boil down the topic which we wanted to work on, many things were coming to our mind such as
Post capitalist society view
Work includes invisible work such as household work etc
Knowledge economy
Hierarchy of Value
Structure of labour
These were the few ideas which we decided to build further on:
Mental Health flagging system – app or a headset
More privacy in certain jobs
Cards against humanity – future of work
Dungeons and dragons based game
Chip on your brain idea
Boundaries in the work space
Gaze
Healthcare Industry
Eventually we decided that we liked the idea of creating a product/service which enhances human performance, as much we thought more about it, totally futuristic ideas seemed a little much, and predicting the need for future that isnt here yet was a little difficult, thus we decided to make a product which not only fits the corporate working population but which also helps out the invisible jobs such as domestic labour, the idea was to create a chi, but the conflict remained that chips are already here, AI is already here, what is the thing which isnt here yet but someday could be? in a society which is still capitalistic, as the idea of capitalism going away in the near future did not seem very plausible. So we now had to figure out what concept of the chip was going to be.
We decided to visit the Canopy Market in Kings Cross. At first it appeared a bit jarring to just approach someone and start talking to them but it turned out to be a good experience as it made me feel more comfortable and confident in doing it. As one of my group members was talking to the owner of a knitting stall, the knitting stall was being videotaped by a lady with a professional camera, thus as that seemed interesting to me I decided to approach her, who turned out to be a social media professional helping her friend, after that we interviewed a jewellery stall owner and a baker.
After learning more about them and their work, I asked them what the future of work looked like to them and they believed that even though machines will take over, their role in the job was also important enough to not be replaced. I also got to know many new things, such as the process of making artworks by one of the stalls, who told us that he sent his art to a chinese manufacturer who then had workers replicate it in an assembly line and sent back to the uk to be sold, which was interesting to me as I never imagined independent artists doing that. Overall it was a good experience as I learnt more about interacting with strangers to get their views on a subject.
In Mango Groups’s first tutorial with Alison we discussed many things, and how our group was still quite unsure where to proceed with our future of work project. Many scenarios came up for us such as how AI could take over 9-5 Jobs, and maybe working would not be a must for people anymore, other scenarios which we discussed were what would work look like in a post-capitalist societhy, in a knowledge economy or in a society with universal basic income,
Whereas all the possibilities of these projects were interesting, the thing which enagaged me a lot was where we all discussed our own personal journeys with work, and thing which all of us mostly had in common was the fact that none of us actually found the work we had done fulfilling. It seemed as if we were all doing what was necessary but it had no passion or room for learning, and work was just a means to an end. This led just to more conversations about where we wanted to take our project. As there were many things that we were all interested in it led us to a brainstorm session where we all sat around the table in our tutor group and started noting down ideas on a paper. This was quite helpful as it allowed us all give our input on what we should base our project on.
After the brainstorming session, we decided that to get more insight into where we want this project to go we decided to do the activity which was to visit a place of work, which was a market.
The unit 2 brief asks us to create a “Future of Work” scenario, through the method of speculative design, and allows us to freely come up with a project. When I first read the brief many different scenarios came to my mind, as speculative design allows us to imagine and anticipate a futuristic solution to a problem. A few ideas which I had were futuristic modes of organisations, re-imaging workspaces, AI and it’s role in work ahead, the effect of automation on the labor force etc. To get ourselves educated with speculative design we were asked to do some reading around the topic. The reading I chose was “Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative and Alternative Things” by Bruce M Tharp, Stephanie M.
This book has given me the understanding, about how good design can provide solutions to many problems, such as in construction, pharma and medicine, education etc. This book gives us a much more deeper incite into how discursive design can help in improving societal problems. They have mentioned how the problem with design is the communication behind it, while they commend designers who create designs which speak for themselves, they believe that the writing, speaking and gesturing is what reinforces the effect of the work done by designers.
The thing which I found interesting about this book is that there are contrasting view points provided, the authors have included one whole chapter just to point out the things which are going wrong in design, with the chapter aptly named, “What’s wrong with design”, which has given the reader a view into how chosing commercialisation and functionalism has led us to ignore the intellectual contribution of design. I particularly found the case study about the Yog headset very interesting, which was created in the Global Futures lab at RISD, which focuses on evoking non-western versions of the future. This made me think about the future of work, and how we might have to go backwards in history to evolve ahead and how maybe the future is back to analog.
