The charismatic, visionary company we call AugHumana promises a new definition of human-well being. Vision 7 introduces a glamorous future; a turning point in our increasingly techno-human society. Or is this a troublesome future? Have we gone too far? If some components of Vision 7 seem insidious, thatʼs no mistake.

The story of AugHumana is design fiction: a convergence of four areas of thought. The first is science fiction. The second is critical design, an area that examines design implications through a critical eye. Thirdly, conventional design: the practices of visual communication design, industrial design, and interior design, which are the academic backgrounds of the group responsible for AugHumana. The fields of design thinking and design research unite these three disciplines and equip them to develop provocative design fiction. The fourth and final area of thought is the study of futures, led by such notable figures as Raymond Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom.

AugHumana is neither utopian nor dystopian. Instead, it is intended to be plausible, detailed, and believable. Designers are very good at anticipating failure, but often fail to ask: “what are the ramifications of success?” Design fiction is a tool for exploring such ideas. The AugHumana Vision 7 is a platform for exploring emerging areas of concern like transhumanism, privacy, and artificial intelligence.

This fictional technology is not a recommendation, but rather, a provocation, spurring us to, as the ethnographer Laura Forlano puts it, reflect “creatively and critically about the future.” Vision 7 our tool to probe the possible future, examining the good, the bad, and the in-between. We invite you to participate in the discussion.

Aughuman.net is a creation of The Ohio State University Department of Design Collaborative Studio 4650, Spring Semester 2017 through the direction of Assistant Professor E. Scott Denison. It is a design fiction. The class brought together 16 students from the three disciplines of the Department of Design: Visual Communications, Industrial Design, and Interior Space Design into one studio environment to exchange ideas, adapt methodologies and collaboratively innovate toward “integrated” design ideas.

Designing believable future fiction narratives can be a catalyst to provoke discussion and debate with institutional and public audiences and a powerful means of educating critical and reflective designers that question the ethics of what and why we create.

This site, the narrative, diegetic prototypes and artifacts from the future can be described as a guerrilla future, leveraging on the idea of Stewart Candy's guerrilla interventions, a sub-category of experiential futures, referred to here as guerrilla futures.

Project Theme

As part of the course description, the instructor provided the initial provocation, a corporation named AugHumana, derived from the combination of two terms: augmented and human. The Corporation designs systems and products, in a public-facing entity, which requires considerations of product offering, perhaps facilities, branding, service design, communications, and more. The fictional company promotes the idea of human enhancement through systems that could be wearable, ingestible or implantable. The project assignment was to develop an augmented reality (AR) system that could be ubiquitous seven years from now, in 2024.

Scope

The Collaborative Studio is a recurring part of the third year design curriculum that meets two times per week for two and one-half hours. One of the challenges for design fiction is its ability to reach beyond the gallery setting, or those already sensitized to speculative futures. However, my involvement with a larger campus research initiative centered on the broader topic of Humane Technologies (HT) provided the opportunity to bring together an undergraduate design studio with an unsuspecting audience (a technique of Candy's guerrilla interventions). The HT initiative would be culminating with a series of technology-based explorations and provocations, termed as Pop-Ups, during week nine of the semester. Principal Investigator for HT, Norah Zuniga-Shaw enlisted a student audience outside the Department of Design for the experience. The resulting discussion and debate surrounding emerging, potentially transformative technologies, was intended to instill three concepts among designers and the larger audience. 1. An anticipatory mindset. 2. An awareness of how incremental “seemingly benign” advancements in technology can lead to massive shifts in social behavior. 3. The realization that “successful design” can initiate complex systems, unintended consequences, and unforeseen circumstances which are sometimes more disruptive than the ramifications of design failures.

Since a typical semester is 14-15 weeks, the standard design process would have to be accelerated to meet the nine-week deadline which came to be known as “Pop-Up week.”

Process

There were three phases of development leading up to the Pop-Up week: Research and Immersion, Analysis, and Synthesis / Ideation. The first three weeks of the class focused on an immersive exploration of emerging technologies and the socio-techno issues surrounding them. It included an extensive set of links to online articles, videos, blogs, and TED Talks as well as a required textbook. Students were also directed to set up Google Alerts for topics such as artificial intelligence (AI), Human augmentation (HA), Augmented Reality (AR), the Internet of Things (IoT), and other transformative technologies. These could include topics like biotech, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, robotics, machine learning, and virtual reality among others. A pivotal reading was Kurzweil's, Law of Accelerating Returns (2001). In the blog article, technologist Ray Kurzweil presents the case for why technological development is an exponential curve. It was important that students come to grips with the nature of exponentially accelerating technologies. Lectures included a discussion of the origins and definitions of design fiction, the concept of technological convergence as well as logical succession.

Also contained in Phase 1 were focused explorations into AR technology, HA technology, socio-tech, and systems utilizing the IoT. Students identified and shared current and emerging trends and identified funding for these technologies, i.e. they followed the money. These exercises provided a glimpse of what is both socially relevant and genuinely possible, and that in the future, corporate decisions will continue to rely on finding the intersection of possible (buildable), desirable and viable/profitable. (Dubberly, 2010). A key realization was that the product/service would likely not be the first of its kind, but rather an improvement on previous iterations already in the marketplace. The culmination of Phase 1 was to articulate a Statement of Intent (Kumar, 2013, 47). Though the deadline necessitated moving forward, students acknowledged that research was incomplete. Technology is constantly evolving, new advancements will show up regularly throughout development and that students needed to continue to pay attention.

In addition to numerous exercises and analyses, Phase 2 initiated a process of foresight which I have termed logical succession. Favorably demonstrating logical succession required that teams identify real research that is underway and the progress that it is making. Assumptions required verification from journal citations, science-based articles or expert interviews. Media accounts are helpful but insufficient by themselves. Students would need to search these reports to find names of researchers, and locate their actual research. The instructor stressed that it is not enough to say that robots will be ubiquitous in 2024 if we don't see a logical succession, (technologically, economically, socially and culturally) that will get to that place. If certain things need to happen to make a particular future possible, then there needs to be a logical pathway—no wildcards—to assemble these into a rational and believable narrative that explains how it comes to be. If not, then that technology is inadmissible.

As the deadline approached the class now became one team with different sub-collaborations, as if employees of one corporation with the objective of creating the future that aligned with the story. Through the rigorous process described earlier students have determined that a logical outworking of current technologies is a pair of seventh-generation (Vision7), wearable augmented reality glasses that provide users with a high-resolution interactive “layer” that is placed “on top of” their existing visual environment. Because of advancements in eye tracking technology, heat sensing lasers, and refractive layers embedded into the lenses the system is entirely hands-free. Through additional converging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) the system allows for advanced features that enable users to “better” navigate their “real-world” experiences. Featured apps would include driving and navigation, shopping, social media and a medicine assistant app.

Beyond the course structure and guiding the students through the process, my only contribution was a draft script for the Pop-Up. What you see of AugHumana's Vision7 is a student-made, collaborative, design fiction, guerrilla future.

Note: While the site was not part of the original presentation, almost all of the other diegetic prototypes were part of the AugHumana brand performance.

Candy, S. (2010) The Futures of Everyday Life: Politics and the Design of Experiential Scenarios. dissertation. Available at: https://www.scribd.com (Accessed: May 13, 2015).

Dubberly, Hugh. "Designing Successful Products." Dubberly Design Office. N.p., 9 Aug. 2010. Web. http://www.dubberly.com/topics/design/successful-product.html 21 Mar. 2017.

Kumar, Vijay. 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013. Print.

Kurzweil, R. (2001) The Law of Accelerating Returns, KurzweilAI. Kurzweil AI. Available at: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns (Accessed: October 10, 2015).