In-between narratives
We are in-between stories, in-between narratives, organizing how we make sense of the world we live in, and in-between discourses framing the roles technology can play in human experience.
The omnipresent old narrative - technology as a passive, waiting to be used tool - is losing its ability to inspire the future and is holding back new possibilities and innovation. This old discourse is so deeply embedded throughout our way of seeing the world that it creates a massive blind spot. To fully unlock the experiential potentials of our expanding relationship with adaptive, always-on technology, we need a new framework and narrative to uncover and inspire new expectations and possibilities.
The current “In-between narratives” period is characterized by force-fitting new forms of our relationship with technology into old discourses. Missing opportunities to invite social construction of meaning that these technological objects and systems participate in.
We design electric vehicles’ charging stations through the lens of the same narrative that gave us gas stations and fuse boxes. Most of electric vehicles (EVs) continue to be designed and marketed as mechanical totems _representing the same self-centered and aggressive attitudes as gas guzzlers not as part of emerging mobility system. We miss their essence as a new kind of software-defined, adaptive entities interacting with larger ecosystems. EVs are defined not just by their “mechanical performance” but by their ability to invite new forms of external collaborations, new services, and new meaningful human experiences that foster interdepend values and meanings that could help us start putting this world back together in a equitable and resilient ways.
Machine Learning powered Voice Assistants _Stepford Apps!_ are stuck in a subservient role and awkward command/control interface where we clumsily push “decision tree buttons” using our tongue rather than exploring new possibilities. Possibilities like engaging in a curious discovery and an actual learning process through socially animated conversation with a new type of entity closer to an expressive social agent than to a passive tool.
We enthusiastically throw around labels like AI, ML, and autonomy but never follow up with real intention, imagining expanded forms of our relationship with these adaptive technologies. Instead, we are blindly stuck in a narrow discourse of mere automation of a few bundled-together tasks.
We are missing massive opportunity. Not just in unlocking hidden abilities of these adaptive, always-on systems _ but missed opportunities to start putting this world back together in equitable and resilient ways, through new organization of meaning, and with new set of more collaborative and equitable values that emerging relationships with technology could invite.
We need better relations with the world and with each other.
The old productivity and task-centric narrative that aspires to make all aspects of our lives optimized and automated grossly misrepresents human nature, values, and aspirations.
Human curiosity and imagination are our most valuable assets that will come to play and help us unlock possibilities of our expanding relationship with technology.
Connected world is not just about making more technology “talk to each other.” The opportunity is about intentionally asking: “what do we want these conversations to be about”?
