When AI comes up in today’s conversations, 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. This binary outcome, offers us a precarious vision of the future. But instead of treating the future as a prophecy - an almost religious belief in how things will unfold - the future remains firmly in our hands, and can be shaped if we do so actively.
This year, Digital Futures brings us a realm of opportunities that fall between the utopia and dystopia. Through the selected projects presented at the expo and the dialogue session, visitors can 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.
Thus, Digital Futures is an invitation to engage with our future through the active participation and imagination of designers and their work. First, a number of projects try to 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.
- 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
- Gossiping Senseos explores household appliances through a lens of attentiveness, to extend their lifespan
- Interaction Design 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. Together, these projects think and act beyond the dominant genre, telling different stories about the past, the present, and the future.
- 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.
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 where we want to be, through conscious design decisions. We 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 towards 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.
