Would you sell your dreams?
Cognitive estrangement and possible implications of technology
“Our actual world is surrounded by an infinity of other possible worlds.”
— Lubomír Doležel
Reality is formed via the purchase of things. At least in the consumer society paradigm we live in. A conceivable future becomes actual the instant money is exchanged. In a consumer society, we create a tiny bit of reality the instant we part with our money. If we observe how products can absolutely shape our society, we can easily assume that if a product or service were to be unpopular, it would become a sort of rejected alternate reality. Not only in terms of physical reality and culture, but also in terms of psychological, ethical, and behavioral issues. One of the goals of critical design is to inspire people to demand more from industry and society as critical consumers, yet we’re all caught up in it.
Design can assist us in being more conscious of the effects of our actions as citizens and consumers. In particular the use of dark scenarios creates both challenge and excitement. It’s more about using negativity to bring attention to a disturbing possibility in the form of a cautionary tale.
A good example of this is Bernd Hopfengaertner’s Belief Systems (2009).
Hopfengaertner asks what would happen if one of the tech industry’s many dreams comes true, if all the research being done by separate companies into making humans machine readable were to combine and move from laboratory to everyday life: combined algorithms and camera systems that can read emotions from faces, gait, and demeanor; neurotechnologies that cannot exactly read minds but can make a good guess at what people are thinking; profiling software that tracks and traces our every click and purchase — we all know, this is no longer fiction.
Design as critique can generate action, discussion, increase awareness, provoke, offer new perspective, and inspire. The methodologies and approaches of critical design may be greatly influenced by those of art, but that is all. We expect art to be weird. Design has to be more accessible to the general public; here is where it can have the most impact.
A critical design should be demanding and tough, and if it’s supposed to raise awareness, it should do so for concerns that aren’t well-known. Safe ideas will not remain in people’s thoughts or question established beliefs, but if they are too strange, they will be rejected as art, and if they are too ordinary, they will be easily accepted. It’s easier to live with if it’s classified as art, but if it’s labeled as design, it’s more upsetting because it implies that everyday life as we know it may be different, that things could actually change.
The influence of Design Fiction
Design can contribute to democratizing technological change by facilitating debate on the implications of advanced scientific research. So we need to move design upstream, from product to concept or study, and generate speculative designs or “useful fictions” to stimulate debate.
Bruce Sterling defines design fiction as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes tonsuspend disbelief about change” .
Design fiction has grown out of the technology industry, and it mostly refers to science fiction, placing a strong emphasis on technological futures. Another variation is Brian David Johnson’s idea of sci-fi prototyping, which is a more applied version that focuses specifically on using fiction to quickly explore implications for technology.
Consumer-Citizens
We’re living in such a strange and fascinating time, that often we fail to keep up. Our understanding of reality is being pushed to new limits by genetics, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, neuroscience. Technologies that seemed impossible are today available for everyone.
The ethical implications of these new methods and discoveries are at the heart of many important debates. Yet as Consumers we often disregard the ethical beliefs and act upon other instincts (i.e Social Media and Big Data) or needs. There is a gap between what we perceive should be and how we behave while using services or products. We usually debate significant issues as citizens, but as customers we contribute define reality. Only when purchased do items enter daily life and have an impact. Buying shapes our technological future.
It is while investigating these issues that the idea of a “dream capture device” starts to take shape.
Sorry, what?!
During my research and speculation, my attention was caught by the act of dreaming which is one of our time’s great mysteries.
Many researches are now being conducted to learn what it is and why we do it. The possible implications are enormous. The research is already today very advanced.
Thinking of what could happen in 10 or maybe less years, I designed Dreamer, a wearable device that records your dreams and streams them on demand.
We spend a 12th of our life dreaming, and most of it is forgotten. What if we could peek inside our brain and see our dreams, maybe even shape them?
Did you know that James Cameron, director of i.e. Avatar and Terminator, takes inspiration exactly from his dreams? What if we could see what the original dream was? That would be fun, wouldn’t it? Would you pay for it?
Let’s first have a look at the current state of research
Moran Cerf from UCLA is the lead neuroscientist working with a team on a project that consists of recording the brain activity of 200 volunteers with MRI and EEG. The scientists have divided the collected data and discovered the fact that certain common types of objects fromthe persons’ dreams could be correlated with the brain patterns as recorded by the MRI scanner.In the next stage, the scientists have used an internet search engine to look for images that were similar to the objects from the persons’ dreams and entered the data into a learning algorithm that can refine the model even further.
“And finally, if we can actually show your thoughts, we can just project them on a screen in front of your eyes. And this is what we did five years ago. So naturally, when people saw thoughts on a screen, they started imagining the possibility of decoding dreams in the same way. Which we did not do.
Until two years ago.
When I got a call from the BBC again, and they asked me about dream recording, I told them, “You know, we’ve been through it before.” And they said, “No, we actually want you to comment on the work of someone that just came out that shows that this can be done.” So it turns out, three years after I explained to everyone why this was only theoretically possible, a colleague of mine, Professor Yukiyasu Kamitani from Japan, was inspired by it and did it. And that’s when I decided I want to do it myself. So I decided I’m going to dive into dream research in two paths. The researcher in me said I’m going to try to see if we can access them and show them, and the hacker in me said I want to see if we can influence them and change people’s behaviors”. — Moran Cerf
To know more about his research method, please watch this TED talk.
Meanwhile…
the researchers of the MIT invent DORMIO, a device that can literally allow to incept and manipulate dreams during the state of hypnagogia and the russian Neurorobotics lab at MIPT, led by Vladimir Konyshev, invents a method to actually reconstructs the images seen by a person in real time through EEG.
“Our research group is excited to be pioneering new, compact, and cheap technologies for studying sleep and interfacing with dreams, thereby opening up opportunities for more studies to happen and for these experiments to take place in natural settings.Technologies explored included flexible circuit boards, optogenetics, portable olfactometers, and wearable cortisol sensors, each an opportunity for translating sleep laboratory dream influencing techniques into real-world settings.” — MIT researchers
As you can see, the current status of research is very promising. If we think of mergin the technologies, we can assume that the device Dreamer is possible.
A Dream Dystopia
Remembering everything previously said about design fiction, to analyze futures we must go beyond microtrends and individual futures to the future of a bigger collective: the future of a group, organization, enterprise, society, or globe. So let’s explore the possible applications and implications of the device.
So: Dreamer is a wearable device that records your dreams and streams them on demand.
The value proposition for the device is pretty strong.
I can see three layers. The first is where we have the advantages for the people who wears the device to sleep. They are selling their most intimate thoughts to get a passive income, followers, and few otehr benefits. I like to call them The Influencers.
Then we have the entertainment industry, who will benefit from both the streaming sales, the high engagement rate and also from the sales of the dreams data.
The third layer is represented by the profits the tech giants and the corporates could make, buy buying dreams data and evaluate them to discover customers’ hidden needs.
Taking a closer look at the film and entertainment industries, production costs have currently risen to +$13.6 billion, increasing year after year in a mad dash to develop ever-better products and outperform competitors. Behind the movie industry, to paraphrase VICE, there’s a mess of Environmental Wreckage. The streaming business will profit from the adoption of the new technology because it would cut both production costs and reduce environmental impact.
They could market a “passive income-earn while you sleep” campaign for The Influencers and would provide benefits such as giving the free recording for medical purposes.
The connected app then stores the recording on the cloud and makes them accessible to the streaming platform. The audience will be able to choose from thousands of dreamers, every-night-a-new-dream-movie. They will follow the psyche of their actors like today they do on social media. The experience can be immersive with the use of virtual reality devices.
The engagement rates would probably spike. With premium plans they could be also able to watch or experience live and unfiltered dreams for people in other timezones or even to incept the dreams and influence them directly from their couch or their VR device.
I would suggest you also give a look to the Business Model my colleague
created.
Other non dystopian usage alternatives
could space from psychological to artistic fields. Patients could look at their dreams to understand their subconscious. We could easily replace journaling early morning. Tibetan doctors have used dreams for diagnosis and healing. Tibetan dream yoga is said to be a preparation for death and a pathway to enlightenment. The paths to consciousness and cognition are still deeply unexplored. If we imagine even further, we could even transmit our dreams to blind people, to give them a new level of perception and an idea of how the world appatently looks like.
Neuroscientists are now presenting us with a new tool for controlling our dreams, a new canvas on which to construct experiences, and a new project that comes to life as we sleep. As a result, designers, musicians, and filmmakers may now create new experiences. Because, ultimately, we are now able to help individuals modify their behavior and gain a deeper understanding of oneselves.
I personally can’t wait to be able to use the algorithms of the dreams research to create wonderful neural networks and generative artworks.
Maybe for the next challenge ;)
