Archive

More-Than-Human Centred Design

I think it’s impor­tant to say that one thing about our work is that we are not fix­at­ed on the future as a strict lin­ear pro­gres­sion. We start by acknowl­edg­ing the fact that the future is not a fixed des­ti­na­tion but a constantly-shifting and unfold­ing space of diverse potential.

The Oppenheimer Moment

Where did this evil stuff come from? Are we evil? I’m per­fect­ly will­ing to stip­u­late you are not evil. Neither is your boss evil. Nor is Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. And yet the results of our work, our best most altru­is­tic work, often turns evil when it’s deployed in the larg­er world. We go to work every day, gen­uine­ly expect­ing to make the world a bet­ter place with our pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy. But some­how, evil is sneak­ing in despite our good intentions.

Parenting a Mind

BJ Copeland states that a strong AI machine would be one, built in the form of a man; two, have the same sen­so­ry per­cep­tion as a human; and three, go through the same edu­ca­tion and learn­ing process­es as a human child. With these three attrib­ut­es, sim­i­lar to human devel­op­ment, the mind of the machine would be born as a child and will even­tu­al­ly mature as an adult. 

Living in Information

The fram­ing of what we design is very impor­tant to how we go about it. We have not been fram­ing these things as con­texts. We’ve been fram­ing them as prod­ucts, ser­vices, and a whole oth­er series of terms that are— Tools, for exam­ple. And these are things that are most­ly trans­ac­tion­al. They’re not things that are meant to be inhabited.

Design for Diplomacy: Breaking Down Cultural Divides

We as design­ers have an abil­i­ty to pro­vide per­spec­tive, to bring focus, and to share the tools that we use on a dai­ly basis to align a group of dis­parate voic­es for a cause that is greater than our own.