Design Fiction: Bridging the gap between science, technology, and design

This thesis is intended to help to bridge the gap between science, technology, and design, putting the most current and near-distant-future issues in real context to understand the range of possibilities and discuss the ethical and moral landscape, its purpose is to set the sensitivity for debate, investigating and presenting hypothetical life cycles of products and services, and identifying design paraphernalia to better visualise the ethics and aesthetics of not-so-distant futures.

The main target (audience) of this work are:

Designers

They should be problem identifiers, not just problem solvers searching for a solution to a pre-established set of parameters. Designers will need to understand the implications of science and technology for people. It is a multidisciplinary mix of scientists, engineers, and designers who are best positioned to understand and take advantage of these technologies. Design can define a simple protocol and clear clues about each robot behaviour or wearable devices so that we interact safely and effectively, working with large and complex data sets is becoming the norm for designers working on new products.

Scholars and researchers working on the design and emergent technologies

Design complexity and emerging technologies there are two fundamental issues regarding the design of emerging technologies: 1. The convergence of disparate technologies, and 2. The increasing scientific and engineering complexity required to work with each of those technologies. Designers have an opportunity to help define the parameters and design the interactions between humans and technology.

Researchers are interested in HCI

We need to question and explore human-machine interactions and consequences once applied on a mass scale to our daily lives. Design Fiction must facilitate debate on the implications of advanced research in science, medicine, social, agriculture, genetics — Design Fiction plays a crucial role in the democratisation of technological, social change by widening participation in debates about future technologies by presenting abstract issues as not-so-fictional enables us to explore ethical and social issues within the context of everyday life, in the late 1970s Xerox PARC one of the first started exploring such possibilities, creativity and science are core to Xerox PARC’s mission to reduce the time and risk attached to innovation.

Though much scientific progress will be needed before this becomes possible, combining AI and CRISPR might create healthier future generations. But the troubling questions arising from each technology would be compounded and new, unique issues could come out of optimisation. When will AI models of genetics to be good enough to for genome editing? When will CRISPR techniques be good enough to make the recommended edits accurately? What is the difference between preventing disease and enhancing the next generations? and how will AI try to tell the difference?

Isaac Asimov was one of the first futurists to explore the ethics of intelligent machines — he published his famous Laws of Robotics in 1942. Today AI ethics is receiving a great deal of attention following advances in self-driving vehicles, autonomous drones, govt, and private surveillance systems, genetics & bioengineering, IoT devices, and more. Europe launched the AI4People’s Ethical Framework for a Good AI Society an Atomium EISMD initiative designed to lay the foundations for a Good AI Society. Similarly, Asilomar AI Principles formulated by the Future of Life Institute, the World Economic Forum has also published a useful set of recommendations for creating an ethics code.

We’ve never built machines before that operate in ways their creators don’t understand. How well can we get along with machine algorithms that are unpredictable and uninterpretable? Not least in respect of black-box algorithms where they don’t employ humans in the loop system. Luis Granados, former director of Humanist Press points out that he AlphaGo computer “makes decisions is a way that is impossible for humans to trace or understand.”

How can Design Fiction help people in understanding the full impact of technology on society?

Irresponsible applications based on the Internet of Things could be problematic in certain sectors of industry, home automation, healthcare, or military applications of AI. There is a risk of over-reliance on systems with poorly designed intelligence augmentation — we need experts to define guidelines before we make these products available.

How Design Fiction can contribute to the ongoing debate about ethical AI, algorithmic bias, social justice, and fairness?

Design Fiction can help foresee the potential negative events and how to bypass them before they happen eg. how could we avoid the next pandemic, we need to disarm nuclear weapons now before it destroys our planet. We need to create regulations laws to handle globally dysfunctional situations for humans, other living beings, and the environment eg GDPR compliance is the starting point to protect users' privacy rights, we need to further refine Issac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. We need policies to assure that development of intelligence will be directed at augmenting humans and the common good.

Machine with some human capabilities using data and algorithms has ethical consequences, machines aren’t neutral, they replicate and reinforce bias, misinformation including misjudgment in the case of autonomous vehicles, healthcare, insurance, elections, and even jobs.

The objectives are:

• To measure the impact that Design Fiction has on users. In particular, in this study, I will observe how confident are we in the decision-making output made by algorithms, and how emerging tools can improve/impact the user’s quality of life.
• To generate a prototype of a Design Fiction workflow that can be employed by designers and users of new products.
• Design Fiction is an emerging field within Human-Computer Interaction, and be applied in an HCI research context, this area needs to be explored further.
• Design Fiction focuses on telling stories about possible implications of new and emerging technologies, Design Fiction method has the potential to address this particular issue early on eg making human-machine interaction more empathetic eg touch screens, natural-language user interface, gestures in augmented reality, wearable devices, the Design Fiction method also can be used in Predictive Analytics which calculates statistical probabilities of future events across data modelling, machine learning, artificial intelligence.
• Design Fiction can be used to question the legitimacy of current and future of privacy, security and challenges which we will face in the near future including Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act 2008 GINA.
• With Design Fiction prototypes method I would like to investigate urgent issues of today here and now ie. revisiting The Hippocratic Oath and ethics in the near-futures of healthcare, wearable devices and privacy, the weaponisation of artificial intelligence is no more fictional, the race for artificial intelligence dominance has already begun, autonomous weapons probably more dangerous than nuclear arms race eg. Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, TALOS.
• Design Fiction also related to more mainstream design domains which are Ethnography, Anthropology, Epistemology, Sustainability, Philosophy and Psychology. I would like to use Design Fiction speculative conversations to explore and generate possible design solutions something which not explicitly explored fully eg. human-machine interactions are highly dependent on social and cultural differences.
• Design Fiction method I would also like to envision possible prototypes beyond human needs. Design Fiction also can be applied to the betterment of our planet ecosystem, environment, plants, and animals eg. Humans can cause a mass extinction of a species through overharvesting, unsustainable human population, pollution, habitat destruction, for food, and overhunting. Can we use Design Fiction prototypes to save most endangered species which might go extinct by 2030? ie. Leatherback Sea Turtles, Rhino, Amur Leopard, Gray Woolly Monkey, Red Panda Gorilla, Bees & others.
• Biodiversity has a unique function in its ecosystem, its loss can prompt cascading effects through the food chain, trophic cascade impacting other species and the ecosystem itself.
• Bees pollinate over 250,000 species of plants, including most of the 87 crops that humans rely on for food, such as almonds, apples, and cucumbers.
• Philosophical reflection of artificial intelligence is another important aspect Design Fiction can help scrutinise further including human intelligence, creativity, cognition, behaviour, empathy, consciousness, epistemology eg. Can a machine be conscious in the same sense that a human being can? Since human behaviour and intelligent behaviour are not the same things, thus Alan Turning test may fail to measure machine intelligence?
• To evaluate the efficacy and performance of the Design Fiction with both potential users and designers.
• To produce several guidelines for the use of Design Fiction with designers and users based on the results found in this study.

To be continued.

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