Here are the concrete ideas presented in 6 mins of narrated video:
- a system could highlight choices aligned with the user’s values (examples: recommend taking Uber pool instead of Uber X in the Uber app, suggest locally grown bananas in a shopping app)
- a system could manufacture custom objects for a user to gather missing data about that user
And the broader, higher level concept:
- data aggregated about a user can be considered to be a “genome”, and perhaps concepts applicable to genomes (sequencing, ...) are similarly applicable
This whole sub field of “speculative design” feels particularly useless (this video is part of a broader novel practice, see for instance https://www.primerconference.com/2017/). A few very vague points are raised, with no direct way to probe the questions or start answering them. This is in contrast to for example the scientific approach, where the base hypothesis usually gives us a clue as to what we might want to measure, change, etc.
So sure, at the end of your multi week process you get a slick video, except you’re not much further down the line of inquiry (and if it gets leaked you have the whole internet turn on you).
If one were assigned to think about this topic, it seems like actually exploring the base hypothesis (“personal data can be thought of as a genome”) with real experiments designed to test the limits of that statement would be a much more productive use of time.
Why did you simply skip over the whole "a system could ignore the user's values and instead only offer suggestions and goals aligned with Googles values"? That was clearly stressed.
- a system could highlight choices aligned with the user’s values (examples: recommend taking Uber pool instead of Uber X in the Uber app, suggest locally grown bananas in a shopping app)
- a system could manufacture custom objects for a user to gather missing data about that user
And the broader, higher level concept:
- data aggregated about a user can be considered to be a “genome”, and perhaps concepts applicable to genomes (sequencing, ...) are similarly applicable
This whole sub field of “speculative design” feels particularly useless (this video is part of a broader novel practice, see for instance https://www.primerconference.com/2017/). A few very vague points are raised, with no direct way to probe the questions or start answering them. This is in contrast to for example the scientific approach, where the base hypothesis usually gives us a clue as to what we might want to measure, change, etc.
So sure, at the end of your multi week process you get a slick video, except you’re not much further down the line of inquiry (and if it gets leaked you have the whole internet turn on you).
If one were assigned to think about this topic, it seems like actually exploring the base hypothesis (“personal data can be thought of as a genome”) with real experiments designed to test the limits of that statement would be a much more productive use of time.