Thinking about digital futures I thought about a progression of ownership to renting living spaces to widespread subscription living. An idea I later saw exhibited at the V&A’s The Future Starts Here Exhibition.
The LAPD (14:20) are using a technique called predictive policing to use crime statistics form the past few years to predict time and location of future crimes. However, is faced with criticisms of racial profiling and feedback loops in regards to only resounding to crime in the same location repeatedly.
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To start off with, we chose an artefact from our base reality that involves a lot of data tracking. We went with the Apple Watch in its current health tracking manifestation. Smartwatches have struggles to prove useful and the Apple Watch has iterated from a messaging device to a health tracking device. Ironically as this is from such a privacy conscious company. However, without publicly leveraging big data, how can health tracking be competitive. Nonetheless, in the spirit of speculative design we exaggerated these features to a world where the Apple Watch advances so much it can diagnose and cure common ailments.
Elvia Vasconcelos’ future exercise involves choosing a date in the future and a positive, neutral or negative manifestation of our chosen artefact.
We came up with a compelling scenario for each. Firstly, the #OMG. This would involve the R&D, Manufacturing, distribution and maintenance of the hardware to be managed by one party, while the data collection and manipulation by another at the user’s discretion.
The #MEH scenario involves Apple continuing the mass produce high market value elitist technology, while socialist groups try to replicate the technology for mass distribution.
Finally, the #FAIL would result in a caste system in the west where the rich become reliant on new technology to survive.
The first artefact we focused on creating was the timeline to help ground our further pieces into. One point we focused on that we removed by the end was Amazon being a competitor to Apple in the tech-healthcare market. This would be a projected trajectory of the current situation where Amazon is marketed and perceived as a logistics and distribution company, however, are a fearless agile technology company.
