Design Fiction Challenge II Digital Destiny
The second design challenge in MDEI Digital Media Design Solutions 1 class was to design a fictitious world for humans. We were given total creative freedom in designing this fictitious future, the final outcome then was displayed in a project room that the team decorated to resemble the world.
The Concept
We used various design thinking techniques such as sacrificial concepts and Affinity Mapping with the help of post-it notes to create a speculative design of a possible future, probable future or plausible future of our world. The idea of big data was what intrigued us the most. We tried to speculate how the data being collected from each and every citizen would change our world in the future. This is how Digital Destiny was born. We wanted to create a world that is not the ultimate utopia or dystopia, we wanted the audience to think twice before labeling Digital Destiny black or white.
In this world:
-The system makes decision for the citizens
- People have accepted the fact that the system knows better than them.
- Big corporations are in control.
- Big data and machines outsmarted people that they became in charge of people’s life.
- Big Data is the government.
- Point system ranks citizens
- Deviant or misbehaved citizen who didn’t follow the suggested offer lose points and are second class citizens.
Digital Destiny is A world where people’s free well is being taken from them. The big data is a mean to make life perfect for people, slowly and through the years everyone accepted it to the point it became integrated in their lives. The dependence on Iris (decision making technology) became natural to the second generation and now 90% of the population use this technology. Only 10% are against it.
We had many discussions about how to execute the world and in what medium explain it best to the audience. The team finally decided to mix propaganda and a rebellion act against it, to show both sides of the story.
The Videos
Glitch, the rebellion team attempts to tell people about the problem and how they are controlled by big data and overly dependent on it, while the president of the United States talks about Iris’s merits.
Me and @Piyush Bandyopadhyay were responsible for the shooting videos and edits. And @christinamchung was our lovely president. We used a green screen in order to be able to create a futuristic environment.
One thing that we overlooked during the shooting was the reflection of the green screen on the podium. Which resulted in complicating the keying process and sacrificing some details.
Still of the president’s speech and the rebellion group Glitch call to action
In addition to the videos we recorded an audio to guide the visitors in the room, a poster to explain the point system, hologram versions of the videos and promotional posters for Iris 2.0.
Digital Destiny Room in preparation for the show
In the end, we were happy with our performance and certain that we outdid ourselves in such a limited time.
