A brief view of the contents of our last week of Unit 2.
We had our last tutorial with David, who gave us a bit of final advice on how we could present our current progress of our project, and what we could take from our collaborative process from Unit 2.
Mark’s lecture on Tuesday evening. Surprisingly, the main thing I noticed was the way he presented his projects, which was by showing a narrative of the content of the project instead of basing bullet points off a powerpoint slide, which was what I originally thought a presentation would be like.
That was very useful when I was preparing my part of the presentation, that the content we speak while showing a powerpoint slide does not have to be word for word in that powerpoint because that would be conveying the same information twice.
The presentation went well. We were right on time with our presentation and we also answered questions on how our narrative of HAPPY would impact the future, as well as how policies could change in order to let an organization such as HAPPY exist. We answered with the idea of “tittytainment”, which meant that people with a lack of sense and meaning would need low-brow entertainment to regain that sense of meaning, which could be a direction of where HAPPY might go in our progress of the project.
I had an interesting realization during lunch, probably because part of my unconscious mind was still on our project. I think I would be the perfect person to be recruited into HAPPY if I wasn’t lucky enough to study in MA Applied Imagination and meeting and collaborating with the student cohort, because I was originally a very ignorant person and what was worse, I was comfortable being ignorant. I had a very dear friend back in China who was frustrated by me being blank about what she is saying about political views, but after the collaborative project, I did understand why she was so insistent on keeping a clear head in the midst of the chaos of society. If I was ignorant and not sensitive to my surroundings, I would be an unknowing victim to organizations such as HAPPY, and I would be perfectly content about it.
So on that rather dystopian note, we end this unit. I now have a reason to stay alert and keep aware of the narratives in society, and I would especially take note of the author of that narrative.
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 veryquickly 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.
We’re moving from ideation phase to action phase this week so I’ve been adding daily bullet points and grouping them together throughout the week.
Monday
We pitched our idea about a “HAPPY” organization for unemployed workers during tutorials today, which is a speculative futuristic company recruiting workers whose jobs have been taken by technological products. We summarized 5 personas according to research: the boss, the manager, the chef, the waiter, and the designer.
David suggested that for our primary research, we pitch Google and other companies a website with our project information, as well as set up accounts on different social media platforms. I love this suggestion because websites and social media accounts are more efficient and has an audience from a worldwide spectre. Though I suspect it won’t be as easy to carry out as we had planned.
Tuesday
In our group discussion today we separated our roles (research, interview, website, video), and planned to piece everything together in our process of individually finishing our work. Personally I was having some problems in deciphering the importance of the process when I was actually creating part of the outcome (I chose to create the layout of our website and I automatically switched into the muscle-memory of getting everything perfect instead of focusing on the process and making everything low-tech). It’s a weird feeling to balance the importance of process and outcome, since both are important in their own way.
I maintain that we’ll still need off-line, face-to-face interviews even if we’re pitching a website as well as a social media platform into the world and target whatever companies that fits into the genre of hospitality and tech. And we need to do that FAST.
(I’m seriously planning on just grabbing people when I go to a restaurant, but that might not be wise due to ethical terms).
We also need to target one member of every company like David suggested during tutorials.
Wednesday
We had a lecture that focused on agency and social rights which was really helpful not only to our group project, but also to me as an individual in life. With Sasha’s help, I learned that agency is the feeling of control, of action and consequences. If one doesn’t have agency in an environment or situation, one feels uncomfortable in that scenario. Which led me to ask the question about how hospitality workers felt about technology taking over human labour, and how tech workers felt about the fact that the technology they were helping to create is slowly taking over their own jobs.
Sasha also mentioned that the Worker of the Future would have to be a “Superhero” with all the superheroey traits like multiple skills and maximum time management, but also humane traits like determination and courage. If we put this character into our speculative future, this persona would have to be the group of workers who haven’t been replaced by technology. I am currently unsure of the reason of that, but I’m guessing that they had adapted a new form of agency with the relation of AI and tech to feel comfortable enough to train it and collaborate with it instead of being anxious of it replacing them. I’m marking this down for interviews and the content of the website, focusing on how our interviewees felt about the increase of technology in the workspace.
We had a group discussion this week to set out different tasks for everybody. I’m really glad that our group has a rather Athena approach to progressing our project(Athena means we view ourselves as an entire group instead of individuals with different roles, learned from Richard’s lecture on Wednesday nights) and would help each other out with our initially assigned tasks. The Group Journal on Miro was constantly updated during our progress.
After the discussion, I had a chat with Louason, who kindly retold me the entire theory of HAPPY and I documented his words below in this map.
Thursday
We had a slight adjustment to our schedule because we wanted to add a 3D sculpture into the project initially but we ditched the idea because time is running out. We had to balance interest/interaction and time as we move forward into the assessment phase.
We also started interviewing people from hospitality and tech industries that we could access and add the results into our research.
Friday & Saturday
Still updating on our progress. Starting to feel a bit stressed out because I couldn’t see the bigger picture of the project when I’m focused on getting the details right. I’m anxious about time running out and whether we are on the right path, and I think I need some time to take a step back and look at our project from a wider scale in integrity as well as look throughout the timeline on how we developed what we have in our hands now.
(We also had an instagram account that has been created since Tuesday and we’re still working on the details on how to manage it. My personal opinion is to make it an immersive and interactive experience, indicating that we are recruiting new workers for HAPPY and we are advertising online.)
Additional thoughts about the Incubator next Thursday. Whatever research we have yet to gather we can gather during the Incubator when there are people present and actively participating so we can easily get access to them.
Sunday
Someone from a hospitality company had agreed to take part in an interview with me on Monday afternoon. As Khyathi and Jim had both interviewed workers from a tech and design background, I aim to collect information from the hospitality part of the scenario and find out how they feel about the development of technology and how it has impacted their working environment.
This is a Work-In-Progress Conclusion entry of our process of this project. I’m analysing and documenting it from my angle and linking it to my Box of Uncertainties.
The tale of Omelas is an accurate metaphor for our current society, because similar events like this occur in a lot of places, including our topic, in which the child represents the labourers in hospitality, and the people who view Omelas as a utopia represents the tech workers and the daily comfort provided for them by hospitality.
We were invited to use speculation as a muscle, and to learn and apply the theory of sci-fi to actual events in real life. I like to imagine it as something humans carry around and pass down throughout generations, the carrier bag of fiction slowly growing and becoming more complex and concrete in time. https://otherfutures.nl/uploads/documents/le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction.pdf
Although I wasn’t consciously aware of it, we were constantly using that muscle and applying the theory of sci-fi to our project at hand and forming speculations with it. What David said about Lee’s quote was really inspiring to me:
"Speculation based on current knowledge is only fantasy, and only speculation based on concrete and up-to-date research has the possibility to create change."
"Be careful not to be tempted to recreate science fiction based fantasy – you can avoid this by using research to inform and corroborate your data, so that you can evolve from assumption to data-driven insights and understanding that may lead to new knowledge."
(Recreating sci-fi based fantasy…I tend to do that a lot.)
This leads me to think about our future trip to the hospitality areas in Google or Samsung. How we conduct our primary research is of vital importance to this project, because it is the foundation of our speculation, and the information we gather at Google or Samsung, backed up with secondary research, will be the base of future worldbuilding.
Focusing on our current topic on technology replacing hospitality workers in tech companies. We already witness robot waiters in restaurants and self-service cash registers in supermarkets. Research shows that the need for a robotic canteen set—-a system that utilizes robots to automate various tasks in a canteen or cafeteria setting—-is steadily rising, pushing human labourers out of their previous occupations even more. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/robotic-canteen-set-market-challenges-opportunities-growth-hb0nf/
Research also shows that traditional office canteens are no longer practical due to hybrid and remote work post-covid, which reduces the number of people in offices on a daily basis. Survey data shows office occupancy is only 2-3 days per week on average. People seem to lean towards efficiency rather than maintaining inter-personal relationships in work areas, which isn’t really surprising for me. (This part needs more research because it aligned almost perfectly to my assumptions and therefore I’m a bit suspicious of it). https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/office-canteen-business-model-dead-what-fill/
Reality seemed a lot more like science fiction after witnessing phenomena like the above. As David suggested, we watched an episode of the Office, IT Crowd, and Severance together during the weekend. All three were linking fiction to reality, and more importantly, basing fiction on the concrete evidence that came from the real world. Severance was typical speculation fiction and it had a hint of horror in it(which I loved) because it was too realistic. The Office and IT Crowd, while being comedies, each had hints of reality leaking in the background: The Office (Email Surveillance) with the boss(in which the show stated as “Big Brother”) invaded the privacy of his workers by gaining access to their personal emails, IT Crowd(the Red Door) by rendering a former co-worker as an outsider when he decided to dress in a different way. Both comedies showed examples of inter-personal relationships and how it changes according to the introduction of technology into the working areas.
(Now linking the group project to my Box of Uncertainties.)
My individual thoughts on this project when it started 2 weeks ago was that work labour(especially in Asian areas) links to result-based education(why most Asian students are trained in school to have a mostly linear mindset) and therefore links to what I initially called the Patronizer.
The Patronizers are people who educate you in a scenario where they are not qualified or required to do so. They treat you in a way that is apparently kind and helpful, but it’s also their goal to make you feel inferior, whether consciously or unconsciously.
A good example of this would be stakeholders in result-based education that is common in most middle schools and high schools in Asian countries. Students strive to reach perfection to get an A to ensure a good future, and we rank our success based on other people’s failures. Certain stakeholders that benefits(whether physically or psychologically or otherwise) would be the Patronizer in this scenario.
The Box of Uncertainties
I realize I hadn’t seen the bigger picture while creating the Box and would need further research because there is a larger background to the phenomenon I just described. Education morphs and changes according to the requirement of the working environment and that’s why we have multiple different education systems in different parts of the world.
My Box mostly focused on the links between fiction and reality, but I had trouble bringing that link to a practical and down-to-earth basis. I think I am starting to learn how to do that because we are applying the theory of sci-fi to a real phenomenon in order to understand it and eventually create change. I’m confident to say that I will solidify this link in the next 3 weeks and use it to open my mind to newer understandings of what we as a group have been working on.
In Elisabeth’s workshop today we created a map of questions based on the progress of our project. We started by writing out questions individually and then piecing them together and finally filtering out 3 questions that are the most important.
Below are the questions we wrote individually:
The top 3 questions we summarized from the above are as follows:
How are we going to do interviews and account/ignore the assumptions/biases in it?
What is the impact/outcome that we are trying to achieve?
What is the evidence for our speculation?
Something else that really inspired me was Elisabeth’s quote at the end of the workshop: ” Stop worrying about the right decision, and make the decision right.” This to me means that achieving a 60 in the real world is way better than imagining a 100 in your head.
We made great progress during our group discussion later in the afternoon by redefining our original aim and looking further into it.
Our focus is to explore the hospitality labour being influenced(or for a better word, replaced) by the development of the usage of technology in tech companies. We centered our location on hospitality services in high-tech companies, for instance, canteens and gyms in companies like Google or Samsung.
A further note on the group discussions: I really enjoy the vibe of our team because we can have really heated debates in a really friendly background. I feel like we have created a safe space within our group where every idea, no matter how whimsical or out-of-context it is(which are the ideas I tend to give out:), will be listened and analysed in the most objective way possible. We are pushing each other simultaneously and collectively in our project and I’m confident we will make further and more intriguing progress in the weeks ahead.
(Uploading the journal right now instead of once a week in order to not forget:)
Tutorials this Monday was brilliant because we were given new insight on the length and depth of our project. David helped us understand the definition of the meaning of the words “analysis” and “evaluation” and linking that to iteration and change in the working process.
Analysis: to break things down into smaller parts.
Evaluation: (centering on "value" in the word) to figure out what's valuable when it's out of context.
It’s like breaking down a clock and figuring out the individual uses of the cogs and components.
The importance of focusing and documenting on iteration/evolution instead of focusing on change is to take note of the entire process instead of focusing on the outcome.
Louason linked the above to the cone of possibilities, and his words reminded me that we need to open our mindset and be speculatively imaginative about the future or what we think is the future.
To me the highlight of this tutorial is when we are advised to create a persona in order to tell our stories to. Khyathi presented a great example of this: if we put someone who has worked in a technical company in the present and then fast-forward time to 5000 years later, what would that someone look like physically? This example uses speculation as a muscle and projecting the objective truth from a specific corner of the workplace.
This reminds me of a quote Lee stated during Monday morning: Speculation based on current knowledge is only fantasy, and only speculation based on concrete and up-to-date research has the possibility to create change.
Personally I’m learning a lot from my peers in many aspects, and while I am straight outside my comfort zone, I’m slowly getting more comfortable being uncomfortable. I still struggle being logical with my words and I have trouble linking the readings and abstract definitions to phenomenons in the real world that we have been talking about, but I aim to be better at that.
Tuesday
We had quite a heated discussion during classes today consisting of a distinct change of our project direction. We decided to focus on how technology is slowly but surely replacing human labour in workplaces, and therefore changing the dynamic of interpersonal relationships in workplaces. We are focusing mainly on the hospitality section in tech companies, such as the office canteens as well as gyms and swimming pools.
We started creating a fictional workspace with the five of us each representing a persona. Disagreement arose during the discussion when we debated over whether the workers knew that the technology they’re developing is going to be the exact thing that replace their actual roles in the industry. The majority of us agreed that while most of the workers knew this speculation as a rumor or a myth, they seldomly acknowledge it as the truth. So the main function of our project is to show this macroscopic phenomenon in its entire glory, and arise the speculation inside the heads of workers.
We have currently decided on a location which is the canteen section in Google. We hope to gather first-hand information and record data that could provide new insight to our assumptions, and eventually turn them into understanding on the entire phenomenon.
Currently I have a lot inside my head that I have yet to put into words and I’m feeling slightly overwhelmed, so there are still a lot of information that I haven’t written down. I will update this journal entry shortly.
We had an intriguing and heated conversation during tutorials and group meetings this week that made me go straight out of my comfort zone both in format and content. In format, the discussion was increasingly intense which made previous tutorials, while equally intriguing, seem pretty quiet by comparison, everybody was blurting out new ideas in a relatively short amount of time, and I had to literally fight to cut into the conversation, which was surprisingly very enjoyable because I got to listen to different people’s perspectives on the same topic and try to add my individual ideas into the mix.
In content, I was really excited when we touched on the work-life balance(or imbalance when it comes to the Asian countries) because it directly linked to result-based culture (from education to work) which is something I had personal triggers on. As our group members all came from Asian countries, the education we received was more or less result-oriented, which led to us, as well as the majority of Asian workers, to compete in whatever field we are in because we have less resources compared to our Western counterparts. Asian workers have much longer labouring hours than European workers in the same company, and Asians have to adapt to the European schedules due to the time difference. We concluded this phenomenon as colonization in the modern era, comparing this macroscopic view to the caste system in India.
REadings
We focused on the theory of speculative thinking this week and were advised to bring the theory of science fiction into our projects. The real world is swaying on a pendulum between utopia and dystopia(depending on what angle you are looking at) and speculating on the past as well as the future really helps us to define the scenario at hand.
To me the episode Nosedive in Black Mirror really linked to our topic, because it was an exaggerated version of the labels of real society nowadays and its impact on people are quite accurately described. Personally I’m still contemplating how to use speculative thinking as a muscle to make our audience aware of the macroscopic truth that we are about to understand, reveal and possibly change. Because Asian and European labourers that are inside this scenario won’t necessarily see the bigger picture unless they see a model of a similar story where they are outside the 4th wall.
The Next Step
Our next step is to find global corporate companies(so that they consist of both Western and Eastern workers and they are working in an office so that we delete the possible comparisons caused by harsher environments) and contact them for additional information. We aim to compare the routine of workers from both areas and seek out a speculative parallel world, either showing a more perfect utopia or highlighting the injustice in a dystopia.
