First Published on Linkedin on February 27, 2020 https://bit.ly/3bjXk91

My take on Interaction Week 2020.

Amongst the 80 speakers at this year’s conference were some of the biggest names in the industry and some fresh new talent. Of the conferences I’ve recently attended, the IxDA’s Interaction Week 2020 is by far one of the better organised, situated and curated ones (let’s keep this last one between us).

Throughout many of the talks emerged a well-known, yet persistent theme: unconscious bias which is responsible for both discriminatory behaviours online as well as algorithmic biases. These included frameworks for influencing gender equality, religious and cultural diversity, and accessibility for the psychologically and/or physically disabled. 

Moreover, talks were split into categories that ranged from governance and organisations to robotics, new mobility modes, and the heightening of our sensorial experiences.

A ‘new dawn’ is a catalytic space for sharing ideas and discussing ways to address concerns about the future of design and the design of our future(s). This is the space to envision a better future by design, for everyone, everywhere. 

The addition of killer keynote speakers to sandwich the daily talks over the three days, such as Giorgia Lupi and Jan Knikker, gave an extra dimension to the conference, as their respective practices in Information Design and Urban Design dangerously flirt with the field of interaction design and more broadly service design.

The following are my 7 highlights:

(1) The Internet is not an equal place.

Anneli Westerberg opens her talk with a provocation: 

“Have you ever been harassed online? Do you own a device with internet access? In what context do you live?”

Designer and activist, Westerberg brings research and service design methodologies to Plan International where she helps tackle the ongoing challenges of children rights and equality for girls around the world.

She argues that women’s safety is governed by context and takes on variable levels of urgency depending on that given context. In developing countries, for example, low-income family units can be seen adopting a culture of sharing, where no one owns a mobile phone, and everyone has access to the same device. This brings about constraints that in the West are not commonplace. Device co-ownership has the unfortunate potential to put women in vulnerable or unsafe situations. What could happen if a family member saw private information not meant for them to see? What kind of risks could this incident put them in? What cultural and/or domestic behaviours could this engender?

A perfect example of their work can be found with Girls out loud— an online platform designed as a safe space for women and girls to share their stories. Amongst its capabilities, the platform offers support for at-risk troubled girls, mentoring events, and programmes.

When it comes to inclusion, gender equality is not alone: physical and mental disabilities are areas that designers are increasingly addressing.

(2) What neurotype are you? 

According to Treyce Meredith, product designer at Carbon Five, designing for neurodiversity would be to cover neurological disabilities that are broader than the typically recognised, and sometimes more noticeable, differences amongst people, such as: Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, ADHD, Autistic Spectrum, and more.

As of today, the landscape of diversity and inclusion in design practice does not represent neurodiversity as much, but rather distinguishes individual differences such as race, socioeconomic background, physical disabilities, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. 

Moreover, Meredith claims that “36% of users are considered to be neurodiverse”.That’s more common than we’d like to believe, and because individuals with diverse neurotypes experience the world differently than others do, their responses to social cues, for example, will be atypical and deserve to be considered when designing online tools and platforms.

For him, interfaces that address challenges faced by dyslexic individuals, like Grammarly, are forgiving of human error rather than embarrass, and encourage individuals to seek help if they need rather than make them feel flawed. (If you’re interested in more examples, visit Cool Apps for Schools for special education solutions.)

How will your next project benefit from building empathy for extreme users like the neurodiverse?

Our experiences of technology can vary from one individual to another. How would embedding multiple sensorial modalities within the design of digital products and services facilitate the reception of information? This is what the next speaker sheds light on.

(3) Designing for sense-ability. 

As humans, we have multisensory bodies. Christine Park, design leader and co-author of Designing Across Senses: A Multimodal Approach to Product Design (2018), describes our sensory modalities as “designed to function on autopilot.” 

In a world where our environment collects data about us thanks to technological sensors that are embedded in our devices and the infrastructure around us, we sleepwalk through our habitual spaces. A multimodal approach opens up opportunities to think about what can be done, through design, to augment our senses. No longer on autopilot, our senses can be disrupted, and we can regain awareness of them through directing our attention to them.

Designing for multimodal sensory experiences, Park argues, could also mean designing for less, for non-engagement with our devices and more real-world experiences, where one would activate all of their senses. What would it be like to live in a world where our physiological, social and spatial experiences are amplified?

Through leveraging emerging technologies, such as Cloud Connectivity, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, we can design digital experiences that stimulate our senses. For Park, our senses are interconnected with bodily motion, rhythm and time — these all play a role in how we experience the world. For example, experiences can be physiological, that is, to the body (like wearing an earpiece); social, that is, to the group (like interacting with Alexa); or spatial, that is, to the environment (like attending a concert).

“Focus is the new engagement. Don’t design behaviour. Design focus.”

After following principles for designing for usability, accessibility and inclusion, the new human factor to consider in design is sense-ability: the ability to focus on one’s sensorial experiences of the world(s) around them.

The idea of being in touch with ones senses, of continuously encountering new experiences through design, of feeling the world around us, of being entertained by our technology is akin to living in a future where everything is amplified, where robots live amongst humans and our techno-scape meshes seamlessly with everyday life. But, how far into that future are we really?

(4) To screen or not to screen? 

The forever humorous, clever and thought-provoking product designer and author of four books —Designing Devices (2011), Designing Gestural Interfaces (2008), Designing for Interaction (2006, 2009) and Microinteractions (2013) —Dan Saffer reflects on what it means to design robots and the kinds of challenges he has encountered.

After pushing for topless meetingsand jokingly saying “tap that interface” whilst referring to app design back in 2008, it wasn’t surprising that he would be sceptical about also having to tap robots. In fact, the anatomy of robots is one of the many aspects he highlights as lacking imagination. Do robots need legs to walk on or a face with eyes? Do we need robots to be emotional and attractive to us like would a human being? Do they need to have a screen? How helpful is it for a robot holding an iPad to mimic human mechanics? Does building walking and talking machines warrant the money invested in them if they end up being no smarter than a toddler?

Time has taught us that our expectations of robots are too high for what is conceivable, achievable or even desirable. Robots today are associated to “The three D’s: Dirty, Dangerous, and Dull“. So, what is it about robots that makes us want to build them?

Saffer pushes us to reflect on the reasons for bringing robots into this world. When designing them, we will need to think about how they might fit in social situations, more so than in labour-intensive endeavours. 

In his view, there will not be a time when robots replace humans and take over their jobs, at least not in the way that one might paint a dystopian future. However, the robots are coming, whether we like it or not, and it’s part of our job, if we are to live amongst robots, to consider the intent behind the design of robots, both hardware and software alike.

This takes us to the next robot on wheels we’ve long been interacting with and have seen evolve since the Benz Motorwagen took over the roads in 1885: the automobile.

(5) How do we enjoy where we are going? 

With the electric car and sharing economy having reached its plateau of productivity, and the prospect for mainstream autonomous vehicles, “New age digital disruption promises a lot,” says Harsha Babu, design lead at Arrival.

There will always be good and bad outcomes with respect to novelty, and it is through trial and error that we can learn, improve and compromise on our vision to fit the reality of everyday life. Theft and vandalism, for example, are on the rise since car-sharing and bicycle-sharing became available commodities, within everyone’s reach, no matter the socioeconomic context in which they are deployed.

Referring to Nick Tyler’s A Vision for Cities (2014), “a courteous, active, safe, healthy, evolving city,” Babu offers his suggestions on how to go about co-creating a better living city, “a future where everyone is together”, both vehicles and the community. To name a few: 1) Work closely with your local councils; 2) Get to know the local dynamics between people, vehicles and road infrastructure; and 3) Remember to apply Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit.

The future of mobility is a hot area to explore as it is directly linked to questions about the environment and our ways of living. It challenges our personal and collective notions of safety, trust, privacy, ownership, and community with the ever-growing culture of sharing economy. 

Making sense of the complexity of transport systems, urban infrastructures, and regulatory codes is an effort that design thinking can address. What would it mean to navigate the organisational complexities of business transformation?

(6) Be like water and adapt!

Paraphrasing Bruce Lee, Sami Niemelä, design leader and co-founder at Nordkapp, encourages designers to adapt to emerging unknowns, that affect utopian visions. For him, it is through sense-making, the faculty of being reflective, that a vision can evolve into a protopia; which is to say that learning from making sense of complexity enables designers to gradually shape the best solution, one he calls ‘antifragile’.

The theory of ‘antifragility’ refers to Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (2013) in which the author describes the advantages of working with chaos. 

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. […] Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” Nassim Taleb

So, how do we design for antifragility? “Visions are easy,” arguesNiemelä. He stresses the importance of outlining a readiness for change strategy in order for design to be truly successful and for organisations to transform. In other words, preparing organisations for the changes they want to implement is an area that is becoming clearer to us and, as such, has become a critical part of designers’ engagement with businesses.

To embrace complexity is to design with an antifragile mindset, which allows us to make sense of the complex systems we help businesses conceptualise, build and maintain.

Engaging in iterative design cycles and stress-testing our solutions is a proven way to de-risk what we put into the world so that they can be viable, feasible and desirable. The next speaker argues that some level of risk is unavoidable, despite having the best intentions.

(7) We help to create challenges, not just face them. 

One of my very favourite design leaders to listen to and learn from, Robert Fabricant, co-founder and partner at Dalberg Design, sheds light on the power of design in addressing challenges and creating them too!

Design revolutions are borne out of visceral human needs to improve our lives and to create change around us. In fact, Fabricant reminds us, design revolution is not a new phenomenon. Technology developed for transferring scripts in the 1300s may be looked at as one of the early design revolutions —a revolution with a higher purpose: to educate people and disseminate religious faith. With that, also, came inevitable social, environmental and economic impacts. 

In hindsight, all design revolutions have and will cause “unusual and unanticipated consequences”. 

Fabricant leaves us with a reflective question to further illustrate this point:

“Have we benefited from gaining back time as a result of technology doing things for us? What happened to promises of leisure time and the pursuit for meaningful experiences?”

The New Dawn is Ours to Design.

As the public sphere gains greater awareness of the positive impact that design thinking can have on businesses, people, and our built environment, the realm of design practice expands. In fact, designers today are invited to sit at the table with the big boys and engage with organisations in totally different ways; in turn, gaining more leverage. Together with key decision makers, designers help businesses leapfrog their competition by crafting a more compelling purpose, devising organisational changes that transform businesses and dramatically improve audience engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction.

At Designit, we spend a lot of time thinking about Futures. We believe that today’s designs will shape a more equal, human, and sustainable tomorrow. Through design explorations and experiments it is possible to design a better future, for everyone. So, we question: What role can designers play in mitigating future problems? What does it take to trust? What does it mean to be human?

More recently, we’ve hosted a number of Speculative Futures events at our Designit London office, as part of the London Chapter series of Meetups. Founded in San Francisco in 2016, The Design Futures Initiative promotes the application of Future Design Thinking approaches —such as Critical Design, Speculative Design, Design Fiction, and Futurism —to speculate about alternate futures.

For years, designers have been advocating for a more equal, diverse, and convivial future. By shaping meaningful conversations about the purpose of design, its raison d’être, designers continuously transform and re-invent design practice to not only benefit screen-deep experiences, but also exploit the full potential of design and technology in informing and changing the ways in which people think, live and act, as individuals and as part of a community.

In the new dawn, we can expect designers to be more explorative in terms of speculating the future of our cities, our everyday technology, and digital environments we navigate.

Links to talks will be available on Vimeo in a few weeks. Be sure to check out talks mentioned above as well as the countless other fantastic talks!

Talks mentioned in this article:

1. ‘Why your digital product should be feminist’ (Identities) by Anneli Westerberg
2. ‘Designing for alternative cognitive styles and learning disabilities’ (Health and wellbeing) by Treyce Meredith
3. ‘Designing across senses’ (Multimodal) by Christine Park
4. ‘The robots are coming!’ (Robotics) by Dan Saffer
5. ‘The anatomy of urban experiments’ (Mobility) by Harsha Babu 
6. ‘Embracing complexity’ (Governance) by Sami Niemelä
7. ‘Hindsight is 20/20’ (Organisations) by Robert Fabricant

First Published in UX MAG on October 24, 2017 http://bit.ly/2DpRsz6

Information technology is changing the way we perceive brands, do business, and conduct our everyday lives.

Millions of interactions are recorded, tracked and analyzed. This is seen in the great array of places and the channels through which information is expressed — examined, interpreted, and communicated. And the surge of data-tracking technologies has significantly shaped how we interact with information, and is gradually redefining how we experience the world around us – as individuals and as a community.

Indeed, data permeates everything — from our bodies, homes, and work culture, to our city’s infrastructure and urban spaces. It gives people and businesses, small and large, the insight they need to effect meaningful change.

Being a designer today often always implies working closely with organizations to empower them with ways of understanding their present and imagining better futures. We now have the unique opportunity, as designers, to operate between strategy and creative practices to influence, not only brand perception, but also habits and rituals across many environments, devices, and channels.

DATA PERMEATES THE EVERYDAY

People are buying VALUE, not stuff

Data connects people and businesses to the world of information. It tells us as much about who we are as it does about the world around us. And data analysis is slowly becoming the channel through which we learn about our human condition and tackle the challenges and unknowns of the day.

Things make us just as much as we make things.
Malafouris, Lambros. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement, 2013

As more objects and concepts become computable, or digitally-enabled, so our workplaces and consumer culture itself have adopted web- and app-first strategies.

The human body, for example, has long been a point of investigation for the healthcare and fashion industries. They have embraced the challenge of studying how it works, what conditions affect it, and how to influence behavioral and attitudinal patterns. Apps and wearable technologies have enabled people to more accurately monitor and quantify their actions by gaining granular insight about their behaviors. By providing data transparency, they encourage people to form opinions, reach a state of clarity and awareness, and develop new rituals to counter unhealthy habits with healthier ones to further develop ourselves. It motivates them to understand contextual variables, set goals for themselves and undertake them.

On a city wide scale, information interacts with infrastructure, systems, and people. In 2016, Uber, for example, unveiled Uber Movement, the open-source data-sharing platform that enables people and organizations to learn from data generated by riders and drivers, in order to help improve their cities’ urban efficiency. The crossover of urban planning and transportation analytics makes it possible to understand urban dynamics. It helps inform the future of urban mobility, the movement’s ambition to optimize existing infrastructures and to contribute to the growth and health of cities.

Data provides a new lens through which to understand and critique our worlds. On the one hand, learning from data has empowered individuals to connect to their communities and cities on a different level. And on the other hand, the rising data-tracking culture has equipped individuals with unprecedented tools and mechanisms of self-awareness.

DATA FUELS BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Businesses are investing in selling VALUE, not stuff

Analyzing data plays a key role for businesses in identifying operational strengths and weaknesses. Insights from data enquiry can point out opportunities to boost performance and efficiency — where digital brand strategies and business capabilities fail to address customer needs, revenue targets, and market expectations.

In the past, big data had led changes in analytics in the financial and IT sectors. But today it is vital that businesses across all sectors apply analytics to understand how their organization performs and learn from their customers’ behavior.

In healthcare and retail, for example, there is greater awareness that data analytics can transform the way businesses operate and interact with their customers, online or offline. Business change that is led by data analytics has been demonstrated to have significant impact on business processes and customer loyalty.

With over 20 years’ experience in software development and consulting, SoftServe has transformed the way global organizations operate through its innovations in big data, the internet of things (IoT), security and experience design. According to their June 2016 Big Data Analytics Report, 45% of organizations use big data analytics across their operations. To illustrate, here are two examples:

OBH Sense 360 created by Outcomes Based Healthcare (OBH) uses data from built-in smartphone sensors to measure patient-reported outcomes in people with diabetes. The app recognizes that when people are sick or unhappy, they interact differently with their devices. So OBH combines data analytics and behavioral science to gather patient insight, and that places OBH as an industry leader in health-outcome analytics.

Boston-based Yottaa provides intelligence that enables website owners to understand the dynamics of their visitors, across geographies, any cyber-security threats the user experience, and the security landscape. With the aid of a real-time log analytics and data visualization tool, Yottaa enables customers and technical teams to quickly visualize and resolve anomalies across their application.

What this hints at is that listening carefully to data can enable brands to understand their failures and optimize their strategies and customer experiences. The economic, environmental, social, and technological forces that are driving ubiquitous data-collection today, encourage organizations to find new ways to address their service gaps and inefficiencies and explore new possible avenues for partnership and brand value expansion.

DATA BREEDS CULTURAL CHANGE

Businesses adopt flexible and changeable strategies

Data seems to be everywhere and in everything. It helps us connect to the world around us and with one another.

In business, however, data analytics gives organizations the ability to uncover opportunities for improvement and expansion. With the systemic analysis of data, businesses are learning about themselves in ways that were impossible before. And accordingly, evidence-based change is at the core of how businesses evolve, driving market opportunity and business transformation.

Amazon is a prime example of continuous business re-invention, by turning their business into a multi-billion dollars online retail store since launching as an online book store in 1995. Over the years, many transformations have led to the company evolving and reaching wider audiences. To name a few key events, the company began by expanding its product offering to selling everything from A to Z with Marketplace, a third-party seller business. It then entered the services industry with the launch of Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing platform, and diversified their strategy to include grocery shopping from local specialty stores through Amazon Fresh. With Kindle Fire (2011), Amazon’s own tablet computer, it has also opened new avenues for the brand to be perceived as a leader in the e-reader space.

In most recent years, the Amazon Echo (2014) voice-activated device for the home has grown in popularity, and is evolving to provide an additional communication channel for brands across diverse industries. For example, FinancialForce’s CTO, Andy Fawcett, and Sales Force MVP, Kevin Roberts, suggest that information technologies, like Alexa, will have a significant impact on the way businesses engage with people in the future. In fact, voice-activation is speculated to be the new business tool to interface with customers and integrate with many brands schemes and devices within the home – such as: lights, switches and thermostats control, music, and news.

Nearly every business faces the challenge of maintaining heritage and tradition while meeting today’s technical, social and economic demands. By leveraging insights from their data, businesses can reimagine how they position their brands amongst their competition while accommodating the growing cultural need for data transparency. As a result, businesses today are more prepared to transform and willing to introduce incremental changes to their operations. To this end, embrace current trends and adopt flexible and changeable strategies.

EVERYTHING IS COMPUTABLE.

In sum, everything that we engage with digitally is now data-generative.

As individuals, technology increasingly dictates our experiences of culture, as we learn to navigate our information spaces and adopt new platforms and communication channels. And with data, mediated through our devices and environments, is brought about new knowledge and a changed relationship to places, people, and brands.

As designers, we tirelessly investigate the hidden causes of business inefficiencies and customer discontent to guide the development of purposeful and adaptable digital services that elevate a brand’s image. This explains why today, design practice is not solely concerned with addressing customers’ growing needs and fundamental frustrations, but is also equally engaged in delivering true business value.

Data everywhere has shifted once again our expectations of technology. It allows us to push the boundaries of what can be known and what is meaningful, and to persevere in our exploration of what can be done with data and what can be learnt from it.

First Published in UX MAG on January 18, 2016 bit.ly/1RR3phA

As I found myself procrastinating while writing this article, I began rationalizing this behavior: for all the hours spent postponing this task and that, I had subconsciously been preparing for the task, mentally organizing thoughts and data.

This made me think of the 2011 TEDx talk, where psychology and behavioral economics professor, Dan Ariely, painted the picture of a utopian society of productivity.

In the future we are wonderful people: we will be patient, we will not procrastinate, we will take our medication, we will exercise…The problem is that we never get to live in that Future. We live in the Present and in the Present we’re not that wonderful people.

Procrastination naturally bleeds into every aspect of life, from the routine of getting out of bed and paying one’s bills, to more serious things like going to the doctor for a check-up. Our brain sorts tasks into recognizable and retrievable patterns, assigning fear or pleasure intensities to these, which permits us to foresee the level of effort needed to complete a given task. But just imagine how much more productive we’d be if we eradicated procrastination, and how much we could improve ourselves.

Unattainable future

Rather than a necessary step to achieving our goals, procrastination is symptomatic of our self-perception and ambitions. Quoting Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Erving Goffman wrote in 1959 in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:

There are indeed many precautions to imprison Man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his Condition.

While it can be difficult to remodel our socially-engrained personas, it’s important to remember that we are evolving beings and not fixed entities. It is when we engage in self-control exercises (ie banning chocolate from our homes), join motivational support groups, or carry out relaxation rituals, that we introduce meaningful change agents into our lives.

Designing for the future self

Psychologist and Director at the R&D Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, BJ Fogg suggests that introducing tiny new habits into the everyday can influence behavioral change and make your desired goal reachable.

Using the same logic, Ariely suggests introducing “reward substitution.” This involves changing a part of the environment to fit the new behavior, by coupling a new habit with something you like. The Adidas miCoach wearable experience is a great example of this. miCoach is your personal trainer wrapped around your wrist (ie the change in environment), and uses the quantified-self as a way to make data more accessible and turning being fit into an aspirational and measurable goal (ie the new behavior).

Living Services: self-improvement interventions

So, how might we shift our focus from the invasive introspective chatter and gear our energy towards learning new behaviors in pursuit of our future, wonderful selves?

Much is being done in digital to provide ways for people to improve their lifestyles. One digital trend that looms large in this space is Living Services. Big data, smart mobile technology and connected devices are combining to allow us to build a new type of smart digital service, capable of constantly evolving and learning our individual preferences and environments, almost as if it’s alive.

These Living Services are more contextualized and personalized than any we’ve experienced before. They will transform and improve the way we live, both by removing mundane tasks and offering services that constantly surprise and delight us.

Living Services can also help avoid procrastination and foster self-improvement. Achieving one’s goals was once dependent primarily on the support you received from others, but with Living Services, you can tackle self-improvement, well, yourself.

Here are a few services out there dealing with self-improvement:

• Headspace allows individuals to take some time away from their day to navigate complex life challenges through “mindfulness meditation.”
• HAPIfork helps consumers eat slower and lose weight by measuring and tracking the duration of meals and the frequency of fork servings per minute. Data is then reflected in the HAPI app to help people build healthier eating habits.
• Mind Bloom is a suite of applications targeting self-development issues such as understanding the effect of habits on your energy levels.

Shifting mind-sets

Without a shift in mind-set there can be no cultural change, no growth, and no evolution in our intellectual lives. It is our perception of who we are within the confines of society, which determines whether we succeed in overcoming procrastination.

With the growth of sensor technology and the rise in new forms of UI, Living Services are making it possible to approach complex life conditions, and through digital innovations, affect our behavior. Living Services, like self-improvement apps, have the power to provide individuals with greater control over their bodies, as digital interfaces are starting to understand ever-changing user expectations.

Design has now infiltrated a market where it can begin to positively impact the individual. Over the years and decades to come, design will help drive meaningful change in the ways that individuals treat their body and interact with their various environments.

First Published in UX MAG as part of The Top UX Predictions for 2016 on December 30, 2015

In 2016, design will empower people, giving them a sense of control over their bodies and environments. More importantly, this is the year that design will fuel all aspects of our social and private lives, and play a role in how we deal with the everyday as a society and as individuals. Digital services will continue to help organizations build stronger relationships with their audiences by providing more informed and personalized experiences that meet their needs and exceed expectations.

We are also seeing the rise of design thinking in influencing how the government communicates with its public. Gov.org.uk, for example, are using design thinking to address the general public with a more human-centric approach, allowing more people to access information in a meaningful way. Private digital initiatives are also emerging in the most unpredictable and poetic ways, such as the Berlin-based Refugees Welcome service, also known as “Airbnb for refugees,” which has invited people from Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria, into private homes. This is a shining example of how effective digital can be in enabling citizens to reach out to one another and connect across geographical borders and cultural/political boundaries. Design has the potential to truly make an impact on society by encouraging a people-centric approach and giving room for a bottom-up communication stream that gives a voice to the public.

Inspired by both Futurama and Rem Koolhaas’ Eneropa in which Koolhaas re-imagines Europe as a network of renewable energy capable of reducing our carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, Dunne and Raby in their latest work describe an imaginary future governed by technology and centred around the car, posing a deeply philosophical question: What is the impact of design on ways of existence? And, to which extent does design take in consideration their consequences on the big picture (society, community, economy, etc.)?

This work entitled United Micro Kingdoms (UMK) uses the car to speculate on the future of our world and the power of design in affecting our very ways of living. The car represents not simply a vehicle for moving through space, but more precisely the object that carries out our psychology, our idea of freedom and speed. The work takes the UK as its canvas and divides its lands into 4 imaginary states ranging from the utopic to the dystopic, in this way alluding to the notion that utopia comes at a price and may have undesirable consequences.

At first glance it seemed as though this was yet another utopia initiative. Dunne and Raby started with a big idea and realised that “we knew nothing about government, or car making, etc.” so they went on to learn how to make these things possible by collaborating with engineers and scientists, in turn ensuring that these imaginary worlds are not simply imagined and inert afterthoughts, but possible and realistic new universes. It was weeks after the symposium that it dawned on me that this project was pushing the boundaries of the make-believe aesthetic.

These utopias shed light on the very power of design in shaping our worlds for better or worse. The Digitarian state represents the most dystopian world in which cars are moving living rooms varying in size according to the economic class system and using colours to distract from the idea that the city prioritises economics over everything else. The Anarcho-Evolutionist state is designed around the limits of engineering and genetic manipulation. That world places the human capital at the centre of everything, involving both notions of the individual/singular and the collective/plural community. The Anarcho-Evolutionist car is a social vehicle and varies in its sociability (i.e. multiple interlocked bikes with open hitchhikers seats for good conversationists). The Communi-Nuclearist state is a countryside styled state resting on the edges of civilisation. The Communi-Nuclearist car is the impossible vehicle within which society lives. It is a 7 foot 4 kilometres train in the form of a moving landscape operating as a nightclub door community: one in means one out. Finally, the Bio-Liberal state has bio-digesting cars made of delicate organic material representing a symbiosis with nature.

Dunne & Raby speculate and have given form to utopia(s) under the critical lens of societal ways of living and thinking. Their work considers the very economic distance phenomena taking place in civilised society. While it is important to raise the question of the majority of the world population living in accute poverty, it is quite often the poor communities within civilised societies, within our own neighbourhood even, that are neglected and suffer a lack of attention. UMK addresses that economic gap in a realistic and plausible manner. Granted much is left to be explored and perhaps intensionally so, allowing the audience to react and imagine possibilities. More precisely, the project raises a very important aspect of our ways of living and highlights the criterion whereby we project our very sense of privacy, status, and being through the tangible varied personas of the car.

What these concepts teach us is how to embody dilemmas within the larger contexts of our lives, how utopian ideas may have “complicated” pleasures engendering dystopia. It’s important to challenge our belief systems in order to push the boundaries of our reality and change what we know and incite new concepts and realities into the context of everyday life.

– Raby, Dunne. The Stuff Between Us: Designing Interactions Beyond the Object. “The Aesthetic of Unreality.” Design Symposium: At Zurich University of the Arts on October 4-5, 2013 in Zurich, Switzerland. http://www.zhdk.ch/?thestuffbetweenus