Speculative Design
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Gerichtete MengeBildschirmfensterInformationPhysikalismusEndliche ModelltheorieAggregatzustandFlächeninhaltSchwach besetzte MatrixXMLVorlesung/KonferenzBesprechung/Interview
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02:41
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03:10
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04:21
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05:43
InformationTypentheorieExploitVorlesung/KonferenzBesprechung/Interview
06:10
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07:38
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08:17
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09:26
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10:35
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11:03
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18:55
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19:24
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19:57
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Vorlesung/KonferenzXML
Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
00:15
In the past few months, for this kind of moderation, what I'm doing now is to show you that he is in the state of the republic in 2013.
00:24
I'm very happy that he is in the next, I must say, capital of the capital of the United States. He is speaking about speculativism. I don't know what speculativism is. Then I asked him if he was in this effort, and this is Lisa Ma.
00:41
The state is also here. And I'd like to say that I can't tell you what's happening, what the speculations of design can be. And that's one thing that I can't tell you and I can't tell you, but that's something that stands out to me in the clear, settled in a joystick-fabric system. And it's very, very simple. And what it is, that works for us.
01:03
It's a big applause for Lisa Ma. Everyone, ooh, look at all these faces.
01:22
Do you think we could all come forward a little bit? I'm sorry, I'm one of those very annoying people that's dragging you away from your lunches. So I know that we'll plod on and leap straight into the hardcore stuff before all of our blood sugar drops. But I'm very happy to be here to explain a little bit
01:41
about the field of speculative design and some of my contributions within this field with fringe communities. And then later on, we'll focus on a particular project called farmification. Speculative design makes proposals that digest large, complex issues into tangible designs for debate.
02:01
It's helping us critically think about all these issues surrounding our futures. What issues? Well, computation, biomedicine, food technologies, energy crisis, synthetic biology, cloud security, financial algorithms, space travel, robotic consciousness. So thankfully, we do all of this using real-life products and markets
02:24
that we're already familiar with. So these are kind of prototypes of theoretical ideas to bring us that one step closer to all these very distant and grandiose, heroic futures research. Why is this necessary?
02:42
I can't believe I'm actually starting a slide with my Facebook image. Because, as you all know, we're entering into this world of hyper-documentation. It pretty much leaves nothing to the imagination. And for us, it's getting more and more difficult to maintain this suspension of disbelief.
03:00
So proposals that can generate this immediate debate and criticism is a very proactive and effective way of presenting research. We have an agenda. We want a bridge between this research and real life in a way that goes beyond our common market expectations of design.
03:20
So for years, we've been asking, where's design taking us? And it's a good question. And this is finally inviting us to participate and engage in this imagination of alternative futures. And we need to do this because we need to counter this mainstream acceptance of our futures from the perspective of passive users and docile consumers.
03:44
So then you're staring at a rubber chicken. Meet Camilla Carola. This is NASA's latest desperate attempt to become more engaging. And why is this? Because we're obviously so overwhelmed by this scientific research
04:02
that we need to overcome this intellectual wall with a rubber chicken. I mean, to me, this is an outcry for speculative design. So what we do is we make things more emotionally approachable, but rather than dumbing down, we're really inviting people to ask more questions. And we want to embrace it from a perspective of messy, complex,
04:25
fucked up humans that we are. So I spend my time exploring fringe groups, people that are largely ignored by mainstream communities and mainstream industry. So instead of leaving them to become forgotten and left behind
04:40
and overlooked in the following speculative design projects, I hope you'll see a richness and opportunity with a future with the fringes. But before that, let's just spend a little bit of time looking at my ideas of the fringe. So this is a bell curve. And of course, it shows a standard distribution of any standard population.
05:01
It could be of any taste, criteria, preference, belief, et cetera. And generally, we like to focus on the norm, the mainstream population in the middle. For years, it was the golden nugget of marketeers and proud supporters of mass production. But I became fascinated with all the folks that fall into the edges, the fringes,
05:20
because I've become more and more convinced that this is where all the really exciting stuff is coming from. And this isn't really new. I'm not claiming that I'm the pioneer, because in the design world, we've known this for years. We used to even have a research technique, very common, called extreme uses, where researchers would observe non-mainstream users
05:41
experiencing a particular product. For example, giving a power tool to a 90-year-old and seeing how they interact with it, or an iPad to a three-year-old and waiting for this unusual behavior to emerge. Now, all these insights and information are then poured back to the original research
06:01
to enhance it in some way for the mainstream. And this is where it gets interesting or rather disconcerting, because there are really two types of exploitation that are potentially happening here. One, we alter the original product for the original users, and we forget about the outliers, and it's kind of like stealing insights from them,
06:20
and they're not caring about them at all. Or two, we take this learning, and we adapt our mainstream product to sell back to the fringes, essentially normalizing the fringe and contributing a loss in their uniqueness. And this is a pretty hot topic. With the design world asking itself if we're really helping or just exploiting through our work.
06:42
Now, with all of this in mind, I started exploring with my projects, venturing into the weird and wonderful world of the fringe, and creating surprising services with cat ladies, conspiracy theorists, and aviation activists. And I'll explain exactly how I do this. The first project is called Association of Feline Association.
07:04
So, I became fascinated with cat ladies. It's because normally people say it with a rolled eye, you know. To be a cat lady is kind of the quintessential acknowledgement of disappearance from society. But they're amazing people. Imagine living with five to 60 cats,
07:23
sharing them with your home, prioritizing them over your loved ones even, and in extreme cases, taking on second jobs to feed those expensive food and veterinary. But as I was studying cat ladies, I started hearing about this parasite called Toxoplasmosis.
07:41
So, Toxoplasmosis infects brains of rats and it causes behavioral changes in the rat. And one of these changes is that the rat becomes less fearful, and this change in behavior causes it more likely to be eaten by a hungry cat. Once there, it reproduces in the cat's gut and is passed on in the food cycle. Now, in humans, we can get Toxoplasmosis as well.
08:05
And it also causes changes in behavior. And the thing that really fascinated me is that from these scientific studies, women infected with Toxoplasmosis actually appear to be more attractive. I thought, oh my God, this is amazing.
08:21
I mean, if you think about all the invasive procedures we've got out there, anything from colonic irrigation to lasers to fish-eating dead skin, surely being infected with a cat isn't so far-fetched after all. So, I created a spa experience that would provide access to Toxoplasmosis
08:41
in the form of a carrier cat available for a high-end clientele. And all of this is overseen under the expertise of a cat lady in a session called feline therapy and a company called Association of Feline Association oversees this whole interaction.
09:01
Now, let's just watch a clip of exactly what a feline therapy session could look like. So, I've just had my feline therapy session. Interesting. Tiny bit weird. But it's a very natural process, you know, how it works.
09:21
And I'm quite into that, the whole organic experience of it. And, yeah, to be honest, the cat lady was a bit creepier than the parasites themselves, so. So, I had that bonding with the cat. And then she showed me some products in her shop,
09:41
some that she'd made herself like cat muffins, cat paté, cat toys, and then other products from the company that she was trying to sell, give them the hard sell. So, in Association of Feline Association,
10:01
I've used a scientific interpretation of an infection in cats to create a service between cat ladies and the mainstream spa ladies, which would maintain and support this lifestyle of cat keeping. The next project is called Wellman Waters,
10:20
and it's a water filtration service run by conspiracy theorists. I was looking for my next fringe group when I came across a bunch of conspiracy theorists in Hampstead. They called themselves Wellman because they gathered at a well to share their findings. And some of their beliefs were quite relatable, while others were just wild speculations
10:42
that even I couldn't quite grasp. And they were quite unapproachable, and I felt very uneasy. But then I remembered that encouraging a diversity of thoughts in the general population is all about exchanging ideas with people that we're not all that comfortable with. And it's also important to point out that conspiracy theories can be helpful sometimes.
11:02
If we think back to the initial informers of global warming back 30 years ago, sometimes conspiracy theorists are just truths that aren't yet understood by the public. Anyway, after delving into this world of paranoia and having some intense research,
11:21
it was decided that water would become the kind of gateway conspiracy theory to lure in potential behaviors, because let's think about it. You're more likely to be convinced about, you know, concerned about some fluoridation of your tap water, which is quite difficult to get rid of, than, say, governmental facilities to cause international depression, right?
11:45
So, well-known waters would become a service, and it's free to periodically filter large quantities of your tap water at the convenience of your doorsteps. What's the catch?
12:00
Well, it takes about 15 minutes, and all this time, you've got someone in front of your door responsible for your drinking water. You end up paying back by listening time.
12:32
So, a lot of people will see us as conspiracy theorists, but you've tasted water, you've tasted it. It's very interesting.
12:40
Isn't it? Now, I know we've spoken a lot about hypothyroidism, you know, the effect on the thyroid glands, et cetera, et cetera, but is it possible that I can interest you in going further than that? In that documentation, what you were saying is that the Wellman would gradually talk about the dangers of mass fluoridation
13:04
whilst he's operating this device. And then, if that doesn't put you off, there's further upgrades as well, such as magnetization and heavy metal filtration and even this aspiration of oestrogen extraction linked each to specific topics of increasing paranoia
13:22
and, of course, requiring further listening time. The unit we created with the Wellman uses active alumina, which is used at the moment with UNICEF projects. And the machine is created entirely out of products found in the internet so that any further converted conspiracy theorists
13:42
could just go home and hack their own. The water filtration platform became this way for relationships and information exchange to occur between conspiracy theorists and the health-conscious public. The next project, Heathrow Heritage,
14:01
came about when I found myself in a London airport. You know, what do we do at airports? We wait. Unfortunately, last year, nearly 70 million people passed through London Heathrow Airport with no connection to the stories surrounding them. As a designer, I felt very much at pains about this
14:20
because we design these places to be very passive spaces. So, when I found out that there were 12th century historical villages that were under threat from the airport expansion, I found this group of aviation activists that protest against this. So, on one side, they have a very hostile relationship, obviously, with the airport.
14:40
And on the other side, they support village life. And with the input of a couple of local historians and villagers, we created these historical village bike tours for stranded passengers. And these would be run by activists. And the main challenge, obviously, at this point, is to avoid any potential conflict between the activists and the airport security.
15:05
So, we found airport complimentary shuttle buses, which conveniently took all the passengers out of the airport and into the villages. Once there, the activists would take you around the villages.
15:21
So, within 45 minutes, you'd be given a journey of where Charles Dickens got the name Scrooge and meet the late inventor of the famous English cocksapple and emerge in what was the oldest barn in Britain before returning back again via the bus to the airport. So, Heathrow Heritage became this event
15:42
where all the parties became stakeholders and two disparate communities with conflicting interests could actually form personal bonds using history as a platform. In all these services, we've seen that the services
16:02
such as spas and filters and tours were actually a way of creating a future with the fringes such as cat ladies and conspiracy theorists and airport activists and how they can have relationships with the mainstream groups. And it's really about sort of maintaining this mutually beneficial relationship
16:24
so that they both have something unique to give to each other. So, it's not a relationship of exploitation or parasitic. And we wanted to push beyond this, you know. So, the parasites and the water and the history
16:42
became platforms of engagement, but it's far beyond our perception of a future with, you know, parasites, water and history. But it's about our futures of using these social awkwardnesses in order to achieve a common, very mundane goal. Anyway, at this point, I found myself in these technology conferences.
17:04
Uh-oh. And I came across this term. Lots of very, very, very clever people would go on and on about law of diffusion of innovation, which is all about how people adapt products. And this is illustrated very well by Tom Fishburne.
17:21
And I started learning that these early adopters, the party guys over, you know, over... Is it this side? No, it's that side for you. The party guys over here are championed for, you know, taking on these innovations, whereas the laggard, the lonely dude sitting there on the sofa is almost, you know, despised and pitied for being left out.
17:44
And I started realizing that there's actually a growing amount of people being pushed into the fringes. This emerging group, what can we learn from this? And this quest led me to live inside a joystick factory.
18:00
Now, for those of you early adopters out there, joystick is just a short reminder of input devices for gaming. And I think with all these studies of, you know, gaming community out there, we really don't know much about the maker world. So let's watch a clip from the research.
18:24
A joystick, like many other pieces of technology, involves a huge amount of design. A typical joystick factory, such as this one in the suburbs of Shenzhen, produces them. There are a lot more stories hiding behind the walls of this factory than are Western stereotypes of unsafe conditions and financial exploitation.
18:42
Considering that there are more than 230 million Chinese factory workers, which is about three quarters of the entire US population, we really ought to know much more about them. To address this, in summer 2011, I came to the city of Shenzhen, the largest manufacturing base in China.
19:03
I spent time finding out who these factory workers are, how they live, where they sleep, what they eat, and ultimately, why this is important. These joystick makers are migrant workers, which means that they used to be farmers who'd left their lands behind. They could teach us how to grow corn just as well as assemble a joystick.
19:26
I tend to be conscious of Chinese factory workers as this big working mass. And in the media, we often hear about this impressive scale rather than relate to these workers as people. When the media discuss factory workers and factory salaries,
19:43
they're really relating to these people in terms of economic value. And from all this work with a fringe, I realized that having these sensationalist stories is something that really disconnects us. These extremes make the people very difficult for us to relate to on a human scale.
20:00
So I spent my time there and related to plunging their mundane worlds, slept in their dorms, ate food with them, and watched soap opera with them. These are some of the friends and images that I'd see on a daily basis.
20:21
So during the day, in the canteens, everyone would gather their chopsticks to eat together in the factory canteen. And we had a citron chef, and I don't know if everyone knows about citron food. It's very spicy, and everyone on a daily basis would complain about the amount of these herbs that were put in our foods.
20:41
And the girls would radically complain about the effect on our skin conditions by picking out all the mountains of chopped chilis from our dishes and piling it directly onto the dining tables. In the evenings, the workers would hang out near the cheap eateries just outside the factories. And that's when these snack streets come to life at night
21:02
with each hotpot maker, noodle seller, and pharmacist taking out their own television sets and pushing them directly into the streets, screening individual channels. And that's when these workers, you know, people would cluster around individual viewer preferences, fair enough.
21:21
And during every 12 minutes, the commercial breaks, we'd all disperse. So if you saw it from a bird-eye perspective, it was a live chart. And everyone would get back to their normal businesses, only to reunite once again to continue with their favorite channel. And that night, the workers would return to these unisex factory dorms
21:42
to sleep within the only privacy of their mosquito nets. Many of these spaces were decorated by spider plants growing plastic bottles, probably snuck in by a secretive nostalgic gardener. So in the next clip, we'll lead to some of the issues
22:01
that led to this idea of pharmification. A more pressing problem for this joystick factory community, however, is that people don't really buy joysticks anymore. The era of iPhones, iPads, and joystick-less games like Kinect sees the end of the peripheral market. These factories are facing difficult decisions,
22:21
and the workers, who'd invested time and energy building relationships, will lose their jobs, the roof over their heads, as well as their friends. I began to think about how these communities are created by our Western technological demands, and how design might be used to help these communities remain meaningful when our demands change.
22:40
And the food question cropped back again. If there are 230 million migrant workers, this means that there are 200 million less farmers. Again, who's making all the food?
23:00
Back in the joystick factory, I presented to the bosses the dangers in concentrating all the workforce only in manufacturing, and also the alienation of the workers from their countryside origins. I proposed to the bosses that workers be allowed to do part-time farming, the managers liked the idea of a financial buffer
23:21
in times of difficulty using the land structures down the road. Other factories also became interested and began asking questions. In fact, we even had offers to sell the produce of the part-time farm back to the eateries in the snack street. You could call it a kind of farmification of the manufacturing process.
23:44
In my month's research here at the joystick factory in Shenzhen, I had the privilege of getting to know the workers and respect their co-dependence on the community. My observations have resulted in a part-time farming scheme that would allow the migrant workers to gain control over their future lives in relation to their past values.
24:03
And I've also become aware of the threat to this community each time our eyes glint on the latest tech fad. So farmification is this very real, you know, it's an example of a real-life solution that explores the in-depth research of the maker world.
24:24
And often in design, the next challenge would be to take this to a policy level. For example, normally they'd have something like a responsible life work balance standard similar to the kind of free from cruelty animal testing labels that we have.
24:41
We've actually become accustomed to this as consumers. But it's actually quite a paternalistic view, you know, it's quite a top-down connection to our manufacturing world. So my practice, although it's about creating, you know, these functional solutions from field observations, the goal of this research isn't really to dictate what good practice should be.
25:05
It's about, well, actually, I'm going to explain this. I'm going to explain how farmification can be applied to invite more proposals, and I'm going to do this using three animals. And also because I heard that using cute animals increases people's concentration levels, so, you know, come on, let's do it.
25:23
So when I first proposed farmification, I was literally laughed out of China, I'm not kidding. But within half a year, all these iron factories that have started to realize that they've, you know, lost all the demand in the property bubble have started doing their own farmification by rearing pigs. And this was seen with very mixed feelings from the public.
25:45
And you can see this from all the newspaper, some of the newspaper sketches out there that people still view agriculture with prejudice. And I totally understand, you know, from a personal perspective, being told to revert back to farming isn't something that's very empowering at all.
26:04
So the next step would be to integrate the new skills and lifestyles that these workers have gained from, you know, working as factory workers to hack farming to decode the social connotations with both our clichés of traditional nice agriculture
26:22
and the horrors of industrial farming for a new kind of relationship between industrialization and agriculture. I get asked a lot about how the factory is doing now, and to be honest, despite all our efforts,
26:41
we had to downsize because a mouse factory next door was expanding into our facilities. But the impact of how factory workers are being pushed into this fringe of the innovation cycle is growing. So I was told a couple of years ago by an educator that in a classroom
27:01
when the teacher said the story of the little mouse, kids would immediately think about these, you know, computer mouse instead of rodents with little, you know, furry ears and everything. But within this new generation, just a couple of years, everyone started to relate to the organic mouse again. And I'm hearing that, you know, we're starting to reconsider
27:20
if there's even any point in teaching this classic pointer device. Should we be surprised if this mega mouse empire should also face the same problem of becoming obsolete? Well, you know, what really surprised the first inventor of the mouse, Douglas Engelblurt, is how long this actually lasted for. This was back in, you know, 1963 until now.
27:42
So really designing for those affected by the being designed out or the lack of demand is really a no-brainer. And recently I've realized that this could actually speak to all the manufacturers in Chris Anderson's new book, Makers, New Industrial Revolution.
28:01
We're hearing this story over and over again of how workers in large facilities, skilled workers, are being overtaken in this age of DIY web makers. And we're told that the world of bits, as in, you know, things, is all well and good. But we must, you know, transfer to a world of, you know, real.
28:23
But this world of real, come on, it relies on a world of people. It relies on a world of food. So this is a heavily dependent cycle. So that could be a next step of what we do with these people. You know, how do we encourage that different world to come back?
28:40
And the next story, very personal, chicken. So as you can see, you know, this Chinese girl running around the world. And when I'm in Beijing, I'm really, you know, missing authentic motherland cuisine. And I'll order something very stereotypical, chicken feet. And my friends always frown at this, you know,
29:02
because I think of it as this delicacy filled with skilled labor, centuries of tradition. But it's actually become quite unfashionable to some people in this, you know, growing globalized middle class who'd rather squirm at this very barbaric food. So to put me off, my friends told me this story about how raw chicken feet
29:24
are being shipped directly out of American battery farms and straight into Chinese kitchens. So I thought, wow, it's actually quite a beautiful story, really, if you think about it. Because a lot of these traditional foods, anything from, you know, carbs, bullfrog, crayfish, rabbits, pigeon, jellyfish,
29:43
all these invasive species are actually what we combat on a daily basis in bio labs. Why can't we just eat them? Before, we used to be activists by refusing to eat foods like vegetarians and vegans. But what if activism was actually performed by eating to extinguish rather than quietly abstaining?
30:06
What I'm saying is that we should be expecting much more, much, much more from our food systems. You know, in the past years, we've actually witnessed activism move from a very fringe circle to an integral part of our media world in our, we all know, anonymous.
30:25
And, you know, WikiLeaks and also architecture in Occupy. We already express ourselves with the way we eat. So people without these opportunities to express their political views could do this.
30:43
You know, they don't have traditional ways of doing this. This could be a really productive way of doing activism, surely. And it could gain support with very tangible, edible results. And this could be a future where political activism, where agriculture is a platform, can be seen.
31:01
So whether if you're a girl watering plants in a secret unisex dorm or the owner of an expanding mouse empire or an iron producer running out of demand, we're all a part of this world of production that's being pushed into the fringes.
31:20
Farmification provokes a change in our expectations of both food systems and manufacturing by joining these two normally traditionally separate cycles. Well, I've really appreciated this opportunity to be here and share some of my strange ideas with you. I hope I've explained a little bit of why we need speculative design
31:44
to change our perspectives, to become a little bit more critical, cynical and imaginative. We've seen how I use speculative design to digest these complexities with the fringes and examined mutually beneficial relationships as services.
32:02
We've seen parasitic spas by cat ladies, water filtration services by conspiracy theorists and historical tools given by aviation activists. And then we've taken these methods and seen farmification, a system of part-time farming scheme for people at the end of innovation cycles.
32:20
It's really, really easy to perceive the fringes as this closed off separate entity. But when we start to rewire the systems, services and products, we kind of tangibly witness the interconnectedness of these networks and how we can benefit and how we can ask more questions. And I hope that through these very curious proposals we can think more critically
32:45
and demand more from technology, design and food to use another way to see this very fuzzy aspirational thing we call future. Thank you.