Public Seminar

We presented our residency findings during our public seminar. Here are my slides:

We were split into two groups for the panel discussion.
1. Culture & Community
2. Tech & Futures

Andrew: In the future environment, or working at a future role as a designer, what does that look like?
Me: For me, I think as a designer, we need to help people understand themselves more, by understanding more of the meaning of life as well. Yuval Noah, whom I quoted earlier in my presentation, he shared this scenario of Big Data, where Big Data catches up with us, what happens when data actually knows us better than ourselves? An example would be the data knows I'm gay before I even know it myself, Coke has this data and presents to me all these advertisements in social media that feature a sexy lady while Pepsi doesn't know so they show me the regular sexy guy. I am of course more inclined towards the Coke ad without even knowing why. I enter a supermarket to buy a drink and subconciously I chose Coke over Pepsi, I thought that I had the freedom to choose but no, actually I was hacked.

Andrew: Tell us one of the most important moments during your residency research
Me: I was actually feeling very stuck before my residency. How can I actually help people to balance their screen-time without being too prescriptive. I went for Tribeless Conversations and I started to think about human connection, I was also speculating about the future, be it a dystopian or utopian scenario, there will be a growing need of emotional capacity, like there is a need of us to go take care of our emotional stamina. How do I increase this emotional stamina? Screen time disrupts wellbeing domains such as physical activity, sleep, social connectedness. After a whole day of work, you feel very burned out, when you reach home you just to use your phone because your emotional capacity is very low, so how can I build that emotional stamina so we can connect more with people and have more meaningful interactions. The pivot was when I started looking into these wellbeing domains. Having quality sleep can increase emotional stamina and mood, if you don't get enough sleep, you may make irrational decisions. I also started to look at time, how can people spend their time more meaningfully, which was developed from our Gigamapping session with Harah.

Nur: If you have another 200 hours for residency, what kind of research area would you go for?
Me: There were 4 areas I wanted to look at before starting Residency: Slow Living, Fun & Imagination, Socio-Cultural Awakening and Humane Design. The one that I didn't go for is Humane Design which I wanted to look at Distractive Technology. Companies like Facebook develop apps to extract our attention, they want us to spend more time on their platforms. The CEO of Netflix once said that Sleep is their competitor, they want people to keep watching on their platform. So I think that is something that maybe designers should be more aware of, like at Silicon Valley, the developers, programmers, UIUX designers should take note of and that was something that I really wanted to look into as well.

After the seminar, I had a consultation with Andrew and he shared a book 'Senses - Design Beyond Vision', which I felt was really useful and will include in my Critical Discourse seminar and thesis. He told me that I should continue the practice of participatory design and I should look at Emotion and Experience Design as well.

Feedback and comments from Nur and Harah:
The residency activities are very thorough and manage to outline the boundaries of your research - it is interesting to see how each residency has developed into a direct response (hacks, app enhancements, video, etc). Overall, the research has followed a clear deductive process and the data has been translated clearly into the design briefs.
Well-structured research with good insights and findings. The challenge will now be to progress into a more focused direction. I do feel that the personal wellness and sleep approach is interesting and worth exploring.

Images by Harah and Shiu Heng.