Nothing is Inevitable
Designing the Space between Utopia and Distopia
Natlab, Wednesday 21 October 9:45-12:30
Organised by: Tilman Dingler (TU Delft, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering) & Tuan (Ting) Huang (Eindhoven University of Technology, Industrial Design)
When AI comes up in conversation today, perceptions tend to split into two polarised visions: the techno-optimists, who believe AI can cure disease and solve global warming, and the dystopians, who fear it will replace human jobs and cause serious harm to life on earth. Through AI, we're offered a vision of the future that feels precarious with a binary outcome. But instead of treating the future as prophecy, an almost religious belief in how things will unfold, the future is still in our hands and can be shaped if we do so actively.
This year, what Digital Futures brings is a realm of possibilities between the utopia and dystopia. Through the selected projects, presented at the expo and the dialogue session, we witness how designers are actively carving a space for our imagination and empowerment. By seeing the plurality in possible futures, we face what we currently have and what is still missing, to carry on for our future.
This is an invitation to engage with our future through the active participation and imagination of designers and their work. First, we make sense of our surroundings and the world we live in: engaging with increasingly complex technologies, and understanding social issues that can sometimes feel too big to cope with. The project Curio explores what we lose in a streaming age of analog interactions; cliMATE offers individual ways to make sense of the climate changes around us; The Virus in Our Home reveals the underlying layer of technology in our most intimate spaces; Gossiping Senseos explores household appliances through a lens of attentiveness, to extend their lifespan; and similarly, Interaction for Accessible Repair resists technology that is increasingly black-boxed and gate-kept, designed for consumption rather than maintenance and care.
Then, we step into the future, designing for alternatives where humans and animals alike have agency over their preferred lives. Inoculating through Play is a game that equips children with AI literacy, helping them question and resist AI-generated content. In Constitution Builder, people choose the values they want AI to embody and uphold. A responsive acoustic enrichment system, built on computer vision, lets captive parrots in a shelter setting shape the soundscape around them. And last but not least, Situated Access explores subjectivity within visual impairment and builds subjective AI classifications to support individual needs. Together, these projects think and act beyond the dominant genre, telling different stories about the past, the present, and the future.
These projects act as prototypes of our futures, be they laudable or exploitative, opportunistic or oppressive. If we dare to reveal what’s here, right now, what we want, for ourselves, then we may land somewhere preferable, through conscious design decisions. We want to invite you to linger in the cone of future, to see nothing is inevitable. Especially in the technologies that now like to present themselves as is. We should have the courage, collectively and individually, to step forward to what we want. Join us at the dialogue session and the expo, learn together, imagine together, and care together, something that may be more fitting than a utopian or dystopian-like world.
- 09:45 — walk in
- 10:00 — welcome and framing : Two prophecies, neither of them designable; today is about the space between.
- 10:10 Part 1
- provocation round with all project pitches (see above)
- demo carousel of all projects
- 11:05 break and re-seat
- 11:15 Part 2
- design debate
- 12:00 Part 3
- taking positions
- 12:25 — Closing question: what would we have to design to move this one step?
- 12:30 — network lunch
Participation is free after registration. Register before 14 October!
Projects on display are: Curio explores what we lose in a streaming age of analogue interactions. cliMATE offers individual ways to make sense of the climate changes around us. The Virus in Our Home reveals the underlying layer of technology in our most intimate spaces. Con/Vince is a game that equips children with AI literacy, helping them question and resist AI-generated content. In The Constitution Builder, people choose the values they want AI to embody and uphold. A responsive acoustic enrichment system, built on computer vision, lets captive parrots in a shelter setting shape the soundscape around them. And last but not least, Situated Access explores subjectivity within visual impairment and builds subjective AI classifications to support individual needs.
