Speculating our futures are always difficult, but someone I noticed do an excellent job with it was Alanna.  Her creative use of storytelling through an audio file is incredibly enlightening. The sigh before “Time for today’s English Lesson” tells everything. I think we have all encountered eLearning that sounds disengaging and robotic. Her speaking with the computer throughout the lesson is an excellent example of frustration with AI. It reminds me of support calls to large organizations where it takes 20 minutes to speak to a real human and the frustration during the wait. When I compare this to her second speculative podcast, the sigh before “What did I ever do before a personal chef” is incredibly telling of what we all want when we get home. Someone to do the housework for us, after we have done a hard day’s work.

My own post used poetry and stock images to get my point across. I focused on innovations in the environment, healthcare, and aviation. I used some creative writing to create poems and use some stock images to make them more visual. Alanna and I used different tools and had a very different focus. Alanna used written explanations, combined with her podcasts, to express more about the future, even the “happy” future with chefs cooking for us may not be good for us, due to “skill degeneration.”

Both of our posts captured the future in different ways. Alanna used audio to create real-life scenarios that I am sure everyone in the class can relate to. It is incredibly relatable because we are all students and we all need to eat at the end of a long day. Her use of sighs is incredibly emotive and able to reach the listener more. It captures the moment, I felt frustrated in the first podcast and relaxed (and a little jealous) in the second. Generating an emotional response from listeners is an incredible way of taking that speculative future one step further because we can hear it, and we can imagine it happening to ourselves.

My post is more visual, and I hope my poetry is able to create an emotive response, as some poetry does. However, I think I would need to reach a point of experience and skill as a poet in order to reach that level. More training may be required in this case. In conclusion, I am incredibly impressed by Alanna’s use of audio to illustrate scenarios for her speculative future.