I created this paper in two different forms, enjoy.
Link- Duncan Speculative Futures
Duncan,
I enjoyed reading your speculative futures post, and liked that you wrote it in the narrative style and included some visual elements text/imagery of a receipt to add some detail to your post and helps the reader understand your vision. My post had a similar addition, and took up about as much time as the writing of the post. Anyway, I enjoyed the way the drone surcharges and delivery fees drove up the price on the bill- a concept I am all too familiar with. Although I wonder about some of the initial price points for food items- given the way that inflation impacts prices, perhaps you could have done more here to gouge the future consumer.
Your prompt was a little challenging- blending the impacts of drones while eliciting feelings of embarrassment? You navigated this well by painting a picture of a desolate future and some unfortunate living circumstances. I’m currently travelling around Europe and I am always cognizant of the use of space in living accommodations here. In North America, we typically have big houses with yards, but this is not the norm for much of the world. I think your narrative is very accurate here in depicting a future of apartment living and cramped conditions.
Well done on the post,
Katy
Link- Seb Speculative Futures
Seb,
I enjoyed reading your take on the possibilities for the year 2074. you did a fantastic job of answering the points of the prompt and eliciting a feeling of decadence. It certainly sounds like a festival I would like to attend.
Your post touched a lot on increased surveillance and issues relating to climate change and resource conflict. Although my prompt was different, I opted to include these elements as well. With the advances in technology, I think as a society we are all concerned about the level of control and surveillance now possible as so much of our lives relies on technology.
Your prompt was a little tricky in that it asked you to touched on ‘issues related to drones’ but to convey a feeling of ‘decadence’… you did a great job of navigating these juxtaposing ideas. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on other ways that drones may impact our lives in the future, both positively and negatively. I live in a downtown apartment and I saw a drone flying back and forth between all the buildings recently. I felt that this was a huge invasion of privacy, but also thought about how helpless I was to do anything about it. There’s no chasing down a drone and reporting it seemed pointless. In some parts of the world drone food deliveries are becoming common, but the thought of drones flying around en masse feels invasive.
Great job on the narrative.
– Katy
Task 12: Speculative Futures
Speculative Narrative Prompt:
Describe or narrate a scenario about a building found a millennium into a future in which order is deliberately coordinated or imposed. Your description should address issues related to disease and elicit feelings of fervor.
It’s Monday, July 31st, 3024. A group of archeologists is exploring an area of what was previously known as North America…
Over the last few centuries, sea levels have impacted the area significantly, with many buildings and cities being decimated. Globally, the impact of climate change has been catastrophic. Extreme weather patterns such as droughts and floods have reduced the biodiversity available. The resulting food and resource scarcity has forced the remaining global populations to relocate. A large part of the population was eradicated by viruses and diseases that ravaged human, animals as well as flora and fauna. There was a dark period of wars fought over resources that ultimately resulted in societies and governments being restructured – there is now one global governing body, a singular global crypto currency, and a military group known as the Galba Unit. The Galba have limited human soldiers, but a vast fleet of humanoids, drones, laser weapons, and autonomous military vehicles to help them carry out their intense surveillance of the remaining populations.
The building is a vast structure that spans a large area in the center of the former metropolis. The building, once gleaming white, is covered in spray paint and many of the towers have been reduced to rubble in the wars. As the archeologists step inside, they can see on the walls the credo which reads “These principles we uphold: justice and authority. We dedicate this building to bring order and peace to the country. Order and stability will prevail as we work towards a prosperous and secure future for all citizens”.
As the archeologists explore the building, they uncover endless surveillance rooms, with some remaining electronic equipment strewn about, badly damaged from the raids. Some of the rooms are great halls, with seats surrounding a central speaking area. None of the rooms have any windows, and they are adorned with several locking and security mechanisms at the doors. The building has wards dedicated to sanitization, full of biomedical equipment, PPE and medication vials, some still intact. There are robotic operated medical equipment machines throughout, and refrigerated rooms for storing what was once a large supply of vaccines. Now, the building tells stories of a time of turmoil and desperation…
Reflection:
I hope you enjoyed my narrative as much as I enjoyed creating it. I opted to let my imagination go a little wild and included a wide variety of possible future social problems and/or challenges. As Petra Lilja (2021) notes “speculative design, or any related design approach oriented towards the future is to use it as a vehicle to approach complex societal and environmental challenges through design” (p.39). The future I envisioned is dystopian, but my goal was to provide some commentary on the issues of contemporary society and how that might pan out.
Mitrović, I., Auger, J., Hanna, J., & Helgason, I. (Eds.). (2021). Beyond speculative design: Past – present – future. SpeculativeEdu.
Link- Carol Manual Scripts
Carol,
Great job on the completion of this task. You have such beautiful handwriting, which makes sense given that you have opted to keep utilizing it. Like the saying, ”if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it’. When I worked through this task, I struggled to write by hand as I have been typing everything for decades now. You mentioned that you often jot notes down by hand- do you print them or handwrite? I find that my students are always begging me to teach them handwriting, but I tend to go over it briefly towards the end of the year and opt to spend our precious literacy time on academic content. I also think that it’s important for them to learn how to type quickly, as this is a skill that they will be utilizing more frequently, and it makes operating the chromebooks a much less painful task. You spoke about the connection between writing by hand and memory in your post. I’m curious about how your experience has been now that you are typing more notes for school vs. handwriting. Do you feel that this has an impact with the way that you engage with the material?
- Katy
Link- Jennie Mode-Bending
Jennie,
I really like the way you overlayed the icons onto your image– great use of the genially program. You were very thoughtful in your approach to this task in choosing to systematically represent a variety of modalities. Your project is really enriched by the addition of images, video, audio, and text features, without seeming overwhelming. Your decision to add a little interactive survey at the end is great- it allows people to engage back with you and your task, rather than passively viewing it. I personally really struggled with this task because I couldn’t think of creative ways to represent each one of my items, and opted to try and gamify it and create a ‘guessing game’ type of situation with H5P and twine. My computer microphone however, had other plans. -_- As you talked about in your reflection, this is one of the challenges of multi-modal communication, we are now relying on a variety of technologies to cooperate and integrate together seamlessly. Your task achieves this flawlessly, well done.
– Katy
Task 11: Detain/Release
Detain Release
This week’s module highlighted the perils of algorithmic decision-making and its implications for public justice systems. During the “detain and release” activity, I noticed that the cases were becoming repetitive, and I wasn’t sure how I had previously responded. As I continued through the module, the added pressure of the glowing red fear index and jail capacity level created extra angst around my decisions. Initially, I was considering the violence level of the accused as an important factor. However, even though a drug trafficker may not have shown indications of violence, there is a level of violence and societal impact associated with the larger criminal enterprise/network. This quickly becomes a very complex issue, and I understand the desire for a system to make analytical choices based on perceived risks. The question is: how accurate is our reporting of these risks? What metrics can we rely on that will accurately describe a person’s violence level, especially when we are making judgments about the likelihood of an event that hasn’t happened yet?
AI models encode personal biases, and their mass deployment amplifies these biases in ways that can be catastrophic. As we saw in previous modules, the use of these systems leads to a variety of unintended consequences, such as an increase in citations being given as a result of the predictive policing machine (Vogt, 2018). I liked the descriptions of these processes termed by O’Neil (2016) as “math-powered applications that encode human prejudice” and “weapons of math destruction” (2017). Unfortunately, once these models are running, it’s quite difficult for us to know how they are making decisions. This lack of transparency is uncomfortable at a minimum and harmful to society, especially when considering the gravity of a situation such as the criminal justice system. How can we increase the human management of a system that many humans don’t fully comprehend? To ensure the accuracy and reliability of AI systems, it’s essential to understand how they are audited. A growing group of people is increasingly becoming concerned about the use of these tools, highlighting the need for enhanced regulation and safety measures.
O’Neil, C. (2017, April 6) Justice in the age of big data. TED. Retrieved August 12, 2022.
Talks at Google. (2016, November 2). Weapons of math destruction | Cathy O’Neil | Talks at Google. [Video]. YouTube
Vogt, P. (2018, October 12a). The Crime Machine, Part I (no. 127) [Audio podcast episode]. In Reply All. Gimlet Media.
Vogt, P. (2018, October 12b). The Crime Machine, Part II (no. 128) [Audio podcast episode]. In Reply All. Gimlet Media.
Link- Steph Emoji Assignment
Great job on your post.
Like you, I was cognizant of the fact that readers would be working through my story from left to right, top to bottom. I had difficulty positioning some of the emojis to ensure that people would view the storyline correctly and chronologically. In my movie of choice, a lot of people get unalived and the pistol only points in one direction, so I tried to make it clear who was attacking who.
It was also very wise of you to consider whether the content of your movie would be easily ‘read’ by your audience. Immediately, I knew your movie was Kung Fu Panda. I did not have such foresight, and opted for an action/thriller that was very difficult to relay through emoji (to be honest, I’m not sure I could relay it through speech and it was an abysmal choice). The complexity of the interactions and the plot were much more than the emojis afforded me. I found that I got bogged up in the details, and I should’ve slimmed it down as you did in order to create a simpler, more digestible plot line.
You mentioned the difficulty that arises from using visuals to communicate, and the double (or multiple) meanings that they can have, and also that you typically use emojis to help convey tone or emotion behind what you are saying. It would be interesting to compare people’s perspectives of what ‘tones’ or meanings different emojis represent to different people, particularly when we are looking at how different age groups interpret and utilize different emojis.
– Katy ^_^
Link- Matt Networking Assignment
Matt,
I enjoyed the thoroughness of your data evaluation and the execution of your spreadsheet. I love a good spreadsheet, so kudos for what you’ve built. I found the data in the Palladio visualization to be a bit vague and uninteresting so I’m glad you went to the trouble of organizing an adjacency matrix, whether you knew that’s what it was termed or not.
During the completion of this task I was curious about which songs had low levels of selection, and it seems that you were also interested in this, enough so to find the answer for us. It would be interesting to run a separate data analysis on the non-selections and see how the groupings changed. Much like myself, it seems that you were left unsatisfied with the level of analysis possible given the Palladio visualization, and were left with questions about the reasoning behind the groupings. It would be beneficial to have more information about the participants (rationales,/age/socioeconomic status/gender/geographical location/musical tastes/time spent on the task etc.) and see if there are some commonalities between the groupings that are currently unclear to us. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on which program you think would be best to use to run this sort of data analysis.
Well done on the task post, it’s always a pleasure to read your work.
- Katy
Task 10: Attention Economy
Task 10: Attention Economy
Here’s a non exhuastive list of some of the dark patterns that I noticed in ‘User Inyerface”:
- “Click here to go to the next page” – difficult to know where to click due to the imagery, size and location of buttons
- Ridiculous password settings
- Double negatives “I do not accept the terms and conditions”
- A help bar that repeatedly popped up
- “Hurry up, time is ticking” stressing me out
- “Select 3 interests” and the location of the ‘deselect all’ button is difficult to find due to the way we read text
It went on like this for a while and I nearly ran out of the patience to complete the game. It’s clear that the motivation behind these deceptive practices is to wear you down a bit and cause you to reduce the amount of attention you are paying to what you are doing. They are also intentionally designed to cause us to take actions that we might not be aware of the consequences of. Since completing this game I have become hyper aware of these ‘dark patterns’ (Brignull, 2011) once during an attempt to cancel my doordash account, and again when attempting to order from the screens at a McDonalds in France. The latter experience made me realize how difficult these tactics are for people with low literacy (digital or print) levels / people who speak another language as we rely so heavily on the way that information is visually organized on the screen. We are naturally inclined to click on the text that is highlighted in a green (or sometimes red) button. People with low levels of digital literacy are particularly vulnerable to these tactics as they may not be expecting to be deceived, might not understand the implications of their actions or be aware of the potential harms of sharing certain information or granting access levels.
In her TedTalk, Zeynep Tufekci made a compelling argument about the dangers of persuasive technology when she noted that it seems relatively innocuous in the beginning (being inundated with the same product you were searching) until we gain an understanding of the ways that algorithms are shaping and controlling our perceptions of the world around us (Tufekci, 2017). The internet can be a difficult place to regulate, and it is even harder to decide at which point these persuasive architectures shift from being simply persuasive and cross over into manipulative territory. As both Harris (2017) and Tuekci (2017) noted, the intent behind these structures were not to be unethical or cause harm, but there are a variety of unintended consequences. Clearly, we need further regulation of the internet, but I think that change will be a much slower and difficult road than it has been to develop these technologies. This is in part because many people do not yet understand the ethical implications of these attention technologies.
References:
Brignull, H. (2011). Dark patterns: Deception vs. honesty in UI design. A List Apart, 338.
Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day [Video]. TED.
Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [Video]. TED.