‘Futuring’ and Emotion — Reflections.

This week, our class presented their ideas of ‘futuring’ an app — our projections of what the future will look like in terms of social media. Throughout the presentation, I had a building tension of sorts — I was looking at what people were making — AR integrations for shops, Visual maps of places you’ve been, new features that would keep you hooked on these apps and i kept thinking to myself, we can do these things, but should we?

Perhaps it was the doomer in me, thinking of all the bad ways these new technologies could be used, or perhaps it was the cautious analyst judging the the outcome of our designs on the future, but one thing was certain — the outcomes were unlikely to be good. Perhaps we should've focused on ‘futuring’ the everyday — how can we incorporate new technologies into the totalities that surround us and our daily life — after all, we do not want to be addicted to our technology — it is here to serve us, not vice versa.

This culminated into a priceless 2 hour discussion post-class that had Sir Amir sharing his ضرب المثل about the little bird who does all that he can to put out a fire on a prophet. His sentiment that while that bird may not be able to put anything out, it is his intentions that will be judged was the thing that stuck with me the most. In the end, that is all we can do really. Try.

At the end, we went through the final of the 109 slides of the ‘presentation from hell’, that this time focused on thinking, deciding and feeling. It covered how different sections of our brain focus and respond to different things — and how our field of interaction interacts with our concepts of mental models and experience through what we learn. Our ideas of complex interactions clarified — the mind does not always learn the right lessons — so we must yet again be sure to guide and SHOW them to what they need to ascertain through our designs. We must account for the time that they need their mind to wander, we must account for their emotions, we must account for their memory and their experiences with others, but above all we must tell stories as our form of hook, line and sinker.