1D Writing


Preliminary project introduction:
I select one of the 5 in 5 projects, Don't Let Your Eyes Betray You (Day 4), as the preliminary project.

Originally, I want to make a wearable device to prevent people, especially those who are immature in mind, from seeing something indecent, like pornography, violence and etc.

The whole design consists of three parts. The first part is a camera which attaches on user's head, capturing his/her view. The second part is a trained machine learning model which distinguishes what is indecent content. The third part is a device can react to block the user's field of view.

I commence prototyping and I wanted to combine the view-blocking device with the glasses . Servo motors best fit my design requirement for its speed and accuracy. However, my metal gear servo motor was so heavy in weight that I had to change the structure design for the prototype, using metal headband as the base and attaching the servo motor onto.

I had a better idea later. When I checked the documentation video, I can not see my eyes, which were perfectly covered by the view-blocking device. I can prevent myself from watching something and in the meanwhile others and the outer environment would not read my eyes neither. I decided to adapt such a view-blocking device into a thought-protecting device that helps preventing your eyes from leaking what you are thinking

To illustrate, eyes are innocent, which would reflect your thought honestly. Such honesty is beneficial for our face to face communication since people can better understand each other through eye contact. However, you must not be eager that to have your thoughts always be read by others.

Seeing that it is a part of 5 in 5 projects, I had no enough time to develop it into a complete product. I defined the project as a critical design object from the first beginning, expressing my critical thinking about the role of eyes in human communication drolly and theatrically. I believed in a bigger context such an concept design can be developed into functional products. The context could be relating to issues like resistance of Panopticon, AI development, data safety, augmented reality, new human behavior, new interpersonal communication pattern and so on.

Story:
I narrate the story as a historian living in the era of human subspecies boom, when there are millions of human subspecies. In a simple word, human subspecies forms because people use technology to enhance their physical abilities and consequently people can design their own behaviors. Almost all aspects, including ideology vary, along with the increasing diversity of human behaviors.

In the era of Internet Threat (1980s-2020s), Internet, which was considered as the greatest human invention at that time, brought humans an unprecedented society and technology boom. Datas were playing a more and more crucial role in this era. Individuals' datas are collected and analyzed by Internet dominant companies and sold to governments and other companies. On one hand, individuals in society were better understood by these organizations, so they can get and know what they want more conveniently from organizations. One the other hand, individuals lost a certain of freedom and privacy because organizations understood them even better than themselves and somehow control them for the sake of profit. Individuals gradually got to know they were surveillanced through the Internet so they began to protect themselves by using VPN and building multi-personas. For a pretty long time, organization could not surveille and control individuals effectively.

However, in the era of IOT Threat (2020s-2035s), organizations can surveille individuals in the reality using super cameras, super audio-monitors, and even plants and animals in the city which were bio-designed. Moreover, advanced AI can detect human emotion by analyzing their physical languages and they can set up models which can even predict what actions individuals were going to do. At that time, there was no way and no where for individuals to prevent themselves from being exposed to the super surveillance. It was absolutely a Panopticon-like society.

It was at this moment, a group of rebel, or we can say new thought advocators, apperred. They claimed themselves as the descendants of Winston smith, who was a main character in the famous science fiction,1984, trying to resist the political tyranny of the Big Brother. They held the opinion that so called human central design and intuitive design were actually the method that mega organizations used to regulate human behaviors and control their actions. And so called "intuitive behaviors" were actually the result of long term adaptation and training in a mass production environment and human physical limitation.

They believed technology has the potential to empower human with supernatural physical abilities so individuals could customize their own behaviors. For example, enable them the backward vision and new moving pattern might appear, like walking backward, walking upside-down. In another example, individuals can change focal distances and field of visions of their eyes, so they would not bother by holographic projection advertisements floating in front of the eyes, being able to see what they really want to see.

With reformed and highly customized, individuals can protect personal emotions, motivations and thoughts from leaking. Only in this way could individuals get rid of the bondage of normalization and own the real freedom and personalities, rather than the machines controlled by organizations. Anti human-central design should be the real human-central design. But the main challenge was that how do individuals interact with the world and how do they communication in a corresponding new way.

Research domains:
#Affective Computing #Human Augmentation #Persuasive Computing