Journals

Before the Incubator

During tutorials on Monday, David gave ample feedback on the website and the video that we created via AI to form our introduction of HAPPY. I learned a lot from Nina while collaborating with her in creating the layout and aethetic of the website and a lot from Jim as he was actively communicating and brainstorming with different types of AI throughout the process of this project, which inspired me to experiment with different types of AI as well such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

My interview went well and added another layer to our research. Ziff, who was a waiter from hospitality had spectacularly different views from what I expected a waiter would have of the development of technology and AI. Comparing to interpersonal relationships, they thought accuracy and efficiency was more important at the workplace and preferred to go along with the flow when it came to the development of technology slowly taking over their area of work.

During the Incubator

INCUBATOR DAY!!!

We put posters across campus to spread the word in early morning before the incubator started. Our aim was for as much people to hear and hopefully participate in our project as possible.

Having loaned an LCD screen for the video and a tablet for the website, we helped to set everything up. We had to do some last minute printing of layouts, research and interviews and everybody helped to put everything together. Several mind maps and mood boards that we created during the workshops in the 3rd and 4th weeks also helped out a lot, so we added that into our exhibition.

We brought a lot of different gadgets from home, and we formed this amazingly distopian recording device consisting of a robot dog(Nina), the head of a sculpture(Jim), and 2 Insta360 cameras(Jim and me). This recording device gave us visual evidence of how many people went past our exhibition and how many people stopped.

We also had a little bit of technical difficulty while adding a comment section into the website. It was a small failure because initially we didn’t think of the fact that very few people would scroll to the end of a website during a walk-through exhibition like this, but we had a better solution which was the survey, which Jim expertly created and added into the website. The survey is a much better way of collecting feedback because it stops people in the process of scrolling to ask questions. We tried our very best to use multiple choice questions because they are easy for an audience to answer, but we had to include a column for feedback and short answers, which we actively persuaded every member of audience to engage in.

Comment section.

Survey.

The feedback we received were mostly negative, which was brilliant because we did design a narrative which was mostly dystopian and invited the audience to brainstorm. The negative feedback mostly consisted of noting HAPPY as exploitive, that the workers are already replaced, and that they didn’t buy into the concept. The positive feedback, however few, focused on the need to work, the need to earn money, and the hope to feel happy:).

We also received feedback from specific tutors during the day. Sasha recommended the Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, which consisted of a futuristic world where robots are high-tech enough so they could do all the work, and the humans are left to play a game that provides them the purpose and meaning they needed. This is precisely what we lack. HAPPY doesn’t give a sense of meaning to potential workers. We currently have a God’s eye view as creators of this project and as students in a course practising the Future of Work. We enjoyed the worldbuilding, but we hadn’t looked through the eyes of potential workers of HAPPY, and a CEO of HAPPY would definitely take that into consideration.

Elliott directed us to think about the Luddite Revolution, where people stopped obeying the system and started to rebel against it. When the society was no longer worth obeying its rules, revolution begins. The Luddite Revolution was an anti-technology revolution that was put down in history.

Cecilia pitched us an idea that the ultimate utopia would be a world where machines handle the mundane and dangerous tasks, freeing humans to pursue leisure, artistic endeavors, and intellectual pursuits. This is exactly what Iain M. Banks said in the Player of Games. (I wonder how this speculative truth will impact human’s muscle to learn.)

Interestingly enough, I met someone at the school bar (after the Incubator) who originally worked in hospitality. When we were having drinks and swapping our current projects, they were immediately drawn to our work when I showed them our website. They said they were deeply concerned about this incident because they witnessed subtle changes made by the development of technology during their work as a barista. This experience made me think that we wrote a very good story, albeit we do need to link our research more securely with our speculation and turn science-fiction(which is what we now have) into science-fact. (We could turn to the TV shows we watched as part of research and decipher how their background research linked to their plot in fiction).

Reflections

Being a member of Group Strawberry and creating a group project has been a brilliantly fruitful experience. I recall mentioning several times that our group was very Athena, with every member actively participating in creating a safe space for pitching ideas. Everybody was tossing ideas and skillsets into the same compost heap and eventually our project morphed into something that had confluenced from 5 minds that were individually different. I loved the process because our group helped me to stretch my abilities to a level that I didn’t initially believe I would achieve.

I personally had some trouble while introducing our project to different members of audience during the Incubator because I was tripping over the logic while explaining the logic. This was initially personally triggering for me because the thing that I was most afraid of（in tutorials, presentations, and academic conversations and debates) was not getting my ideas and words out in time. Yet I could feel myself getting better throughout the day, both the way I string my logic and my presentation towards my audience(which was morphing and changing very quickly because there were multiple people coming over constently and asking different questions about our project in different aspects and different angles). I aim to keep on with this practice while preparing with our group for our presentation next week.

I agree with David that we should have added a manifesto to our project exhibition, but it was a joy to practice my presentation skills in an exciting and heated environment such as the incubator because I was in the perfect environment to push myself forwards.