Is Technology your God?
Consuming technology on a daily basis can amount to easily more than half a day for an average person especially living in a cosmopolitan city in 2018, from the time you wake up by an alarm via your phone, checking your email, calling for an uber, ordering food online, checking social media, and getting around your day. I may not necessarily pray for Wifi, but the time invested interacting with a screen that connects us to an online network far exceeds most staunch Christians turning toward their God for prayer, worship and devotion combine.
Is that bad?
Well, there’s no such thing as ‘bad’ unless good exists. Like any powerful tool, it is a double-edge sword especially when you’re so engross in this connected realm that we lose our balance, coupled with people having different intentions of using it, leaving a huge gap for error and evil. The first caution would be gaining consciousness of how much you are consuming; thanks to smart phones, you can easily check that in your settings.
Like most aspects of any activities, the accumulation of its effects is binary, considering the physiological, emotional and physical impact on us individuals, and how this influences the people around us, creating a complex landscape on how we have formed as societies. Gen Y, seen as unfriendly and cold by the older generations, or more empowered by friends who first experience technology in some shape of form together, we are all part of this big connected landscape, encountering it at some point in the day no matter your age. There is no escape to the technological revolution that is happening.
How did we get here?
First, it brought convenience, then it connected us closer, and 10 years later, why am I feeling somewhat empty at the end of the day when I spend too much time online?
Even as a designer, technology has equipped me with so many tools that expand my technical skill set to execute both my artistic and design skills, I cannot help but to see it’s positive side that empowers me. Having interacted with technology through mobile phones, computers and other high technological gadgets and consoles over the past 15 years, some of it’s interaction is so intuitive, I hardly stop in my tracks before deciding to engage in it.
This is also contributed by great UI and UX designers out there that make these experiences so pleasurable and delightful. Little by little, it chips into the precious time we have, it blends itself so seamlessly into our lives that it familiarizes with our homeostasis, it becomes part of our nature.
Sometime last year, I lost my phone on the train and had no chance of replacing it for a week. Having lost it, I started off feeling so anxious, as if I had lost a lifeline, debilitating me from doing menial tasks that I relied heavily on my phone for. Then I got in contact with my friends (miraculously without a phone) to spend Christmas at a ski cabin, eventually being much relax without my phone as I had nowhere else to be but in the cabin. In fact, possibly more emancipated than my friends who had their eyes glued onto their screens, that I never saw myself guilty of this until I was missing mine. Anybody who had lost their phone can testify to a similar experience, being able to empathize with this roller coaster mood and a realization of our dependency on it.
If technology empowers me, I decide to use it for the greater good of humanity, designing experiences that drive us to feel that we can all make positive changes, no matter how intuitive and unnoticed it goes for most people. The interaction with it is always evolving, and these accumulated experiences of interaction constantly dictates our perception of it.
The series of Black Mirror and my reliance on technology have inspired me to create these visuals of this dystopia, Tecca, where technology has rendered us powerless without it,or being victims of a bigger force that we have no control over, a form of dictatorship through a higher being that is omnipresent, living with us.
The topic on the consumption of technology as a society has driven me no choice to be an exceptional UX designer, because bad design can really ruin’s someone’s day, and with numerous pleasant experiences driven by good design, people expect their experience with technology to be intuitive, especially if you’re going to spend the majority of your day consuming it.
