Speculative Design Project Reflective Notes

Sam Cummins

For this project we (Group C, including myself Áine O’Niell and Josh Purcell) decided to look at a future where global warming had brought the world to a point where areas that were previously extremely habitable were now a harsh living environment. Access to the outdoors was seasonal and dependent on air quality, UV radiation levels and weather conditions. In this potential future we looked at how wearable technology might dictate the lives of people who live in an underground community to escape the worst effects of global warming: How wearables might dictate their life and access to the outdoors.

What went well?

A lot of our focus went into world building, and us understanding where this community lived. We discussed how living underground might affect your circadian rhythm, contribute to seasonal affective disorder, how it might feel to live underground in terms of air quality, atmospheric pressure, how the ambient noise would feel. There were real world situations where these problems arise, and underground living and working present today in various locations, and we read a lot from them and listened to reports from people that lived and worked in these kinds of situations, as well as academic experts. From this we had a clear idea of our world, how it would feel to live there. I thought all this was the highlight of our work. There was a lot of enthusiasm from the group about how we could display this world and depict empathetic stories from within it.

I also liked that our narrative switched perspectives from a mother to a child, and that it demonstrated pretty well that the ignorance and apathy of generations led to future generations having far less freedom and opportunity.

What went badly?

My main regret is that we didn’t develop our technology more. Early in the project we were focusing on an internet of things solution — where the whole environment was monitored and controlled by a citywide system — including lights, day and night cycles of communities removed from the sun, air quality, ambient noise, and individual health and wellbeing through wearable technology. As the scope of this was so large we were talking about all these facets of the system at a higher level. When we began to construct our narrative we realized the wearable technology (or smart tattoos) was the part that was most core to the story we wanted to tell.

Unfortunately by then we had spread our resources too wide and the technology we eventually demonstrated wasn’t as developed as we would have liked.

How I would continue this project:

We would have liked to make the click through world less linear — almost like a video game. A flow where there are side narratives and interactions that demonstrate all we wanted to convey with this world and were not part of the core storyline, but illuminate all the other decisions we made about this world.

Also we would have liked to develop our interface more, and explore how someone would interact with a wearable.

What I learned

My biggest takeaway was centered around the power of how innovation could be spurred on by looking farther into the future into the immediate — many of the tech and industry of our world is focused very much on the immediate results and short term profits, at the expense of long term advancement. Even in the past those in power commissioned multigenerational projects (e.g. the 200 year project of the Barcelona Cathedral), and that doesn’t is no longer the case.

I also learned a lot about the specifics of living underground and wearable technology.