So, in this week, i think we progressed more to the “doing” part of our project than the research part, we presented our collaborated research and tried to reach out to stakeholders(tech employees, and hospitality workers in the same companies). One interesting point came up about how to reach out to people, what grabs one’s attention, and why it is more effective than other methods of communication and reaching out to stakeholders.
I think I realised there are two types of communication:
- Active: when we actively try and communicate and collect from the stakeholders, like interviews, comments/feedback, questionnaire responses etc.
- Passive: when we collect data from underlying contexts, like engagement, change in behaviour, perception etc.
We also learned about how important it is to answer, ‘Why them’, in our reaching out and be specific with the sample of the project and how it is going to affect the data in-turn, a good way to develop this was through developing something interactive and immersive since no one’s going to be interested in just reading a bunch of data and research articles, in a random work-a-day mail and so we decided to make a website which we could put and collect data through analytics and engagement, but with our approach being ‘sarcastic dystopia’, we have to find the balance between humour and facts, so that it does not go into speculative comedy or story-telling but is still speculative design and thinking, and it gets our message across to the stakeholders, and the important part is to gain feedback from the stakeholders.
After this we got to working on different layouts for the website design, and decided to make it a scroll-type design with a lot of brain storming involved in it, and divided the tasks among our group based on our skill set and worked accordingly. I was in charge of getting the research and infographics done and putting them up on our collaborative workspace for easy access. I mostly looked at articles from the government and international organizations to get statistical data.
On Wednesday, we had the workshop about ‘Agency & Social Rights’, which talked about positionality, accountability, responsibility, and biases, alongside basic social rights for individuals. I found it particularly interesting and engaging how my ‘positionality’ can induce so many conscious and sub-conscious biases in my research and how I can reflect better to be more aware of it, and address it.
The workshop also dealt with the ‘uncertainties’ we might face as future workers and how we must exercise curiosity, empathy, and agency to be more adaptable and be a step ahead of technology, and also exercise control, but what are the consequences of exercising these skills/tools in our daily life as workers/skilled professionals? I personally believe that as we are staying ahead of the very technology we develop to still be relevant in the workspace, we learn and adapt new skills at the cost of discomfort, in ways we may like or not like and this discomfort sometimes puts us at risk, knowingly or unknowingly and sometimes dangerous, not dangerous, but it is our perception of what is our boundary of stepping outside our comfort zone that determines to what level we can adjust and adapt, but is all this adaptation going to make us happy? I don’t know because in my life the more knowledge and understanding i have gained, the more numb I become to things, or can I say empathy, since I have the knowledge to look at multiple perspectives, it might make me seem numb or cold to it, but sometimes we do turn a blind eye to a lot of things which are in our control and can be changed.
The website proved to be evidence of our collaboration and as I did more reading into different scenarios, it actually scared me a bit as to how near we can be to complete automation, and I may actually live to see the transition and my speculation, maybe?
Particular reading that stood out to me was the report by McKinsey (A FUTURE THAT WORKS: AUTOMATION, EMPLOYMENT, AND PRODUCTIVITYJANUARY 2017), which talks about how there’s a gap between a theoretical timeframe for automation, and a practical timeframe for automation which is caused by many social, technical and economic factors, and even considering these numerous factors, we might reach complete automation by 2060-2065, which is not that far away and it is quite scary.
A report by the IMF, speculates on how the countries might adapt to automation and AI, and their preparedness for it, although I do not fully understand the economics behind it, it is quite interesting to see how only low-skill or medium-skill jobs will be replaced, whereas high skill jobs will not be prone to replacement, and this got me thinking about my future as a creative, and in my process of research, but in due course and doing other tasks such as generating a script and video, we as a group thought it would show a narrative that we can develop technology to do everything but compiling everything and forming a narrative and explaining it and implementing it is something it will not be able to do, and henceforth, technology is a tool for us, rather than a fear.
In the process of generating a script with ChatGPT, I had to reiterate the prompts numerous times to get my desired results, which shows a particular level of expectation and standard which is achievable by humans, even in the video generation process, I had to remodify and substitute videos so that it became more cohesive and communicated the message more clearly which involved understanding the psychology of the target audience, because what Pictory.ai did was it just took the words from the script and found related stock videos to it, and compiled it in a time frame, which does not convey the message clearly, which rebuilds my confidence that I, as a creative can not be replaced.
In addition to this research, we have to come up with the incubator, which is a space to test our scenarios and gain feedback on the project and make tiny, necessary tweaks to it, which i shall talk about more in the next entry.