The speculative design project allowed us to investigate a comprehensive vision of how we should look forward to the hypothetical future and examine any ethical dilemmas that may arise as a result of new technology and its ramifications.
Our team discovered that we had several interests and topics. We discussed a variety of topics, including privacy, the attention economy, inequality, and novel ways in which we utilise new technology to modify or hack current technologies. We looked at both utopian and dystopian implementations of the signals to gain a complete picture. Following our discussion, we each voted for two of the categories we’d proposed, so we chose Digital Identity to investigate further.
In order to achieve the project requirements, our team creates an agenda prior to our weekly team meeting. Of course, we fought with time constraints and other tasks. Nonetheless, no one shied away from their responsibilities, and everyone worked hard to fulfil our deadlines with deliverables that we needed to review during the meeting. We valued everyone’s contributions and ideas and proceeded with triangulating our communication system to avoid prejudice and loss of democracy.
We strive to maximise our time window for delegating work depending on each person’s strengths. Two team members, for example, shot and edited the video, while the other designed the UI and prototype for final production.
In the project, our team came into contact with technologies that were interrelated and necessitated extensive investigation. Personally, I found it difficult to delve deep into the project at the beginning as it required knowledge of many procedures that I had never practised or was familiar with, such as 4D printing, AI, Brain Computer Interfaces such as Neuralink, the Metaverse, Deep Fake, machine learning, digital identity, and after-death data, to name a few. Every week, I was overwhelmed by the amount of fresh material I had to process. We might have understood the project better and aligned with other team members faster if we had had a more specific presentation of each one’s study findings.
In this project, I did my best to achieve the deliverables deadlines for each weekly team meeting, providing fresh data or new results to the projects. I also leveraged my strong skill sets to fill in the gaps among team members, such as developing a plot, filming footage, and editing the project video.
My worst performance on this project was that I should’ve communicated my approach and design judgments to the team more effectively. I did not take the initiative at the start of the project, but as it progressed, I became a more active listener and took more initiative in my job and duties, allowing me to share my thoughts with other team members. I realised that all of the ideas were being treated equally and placed them on the table for democratic project decision-making. Furthermore, I was willing to learn from the team’s critiques so that my ideas could continue to evolve.
The following are the project’s main outcomes I learned:
• The importance of effective communication skills.
• Establishing clear team goals.
• Organizing the team according to their skill sets.
• The most effective method of communicating my design approach.
