In_between narratives
In_between narratives
When technology become our companion
01. Premise
We are in a moment when we need to continue learning new things and new ways how to put this world back together, in equitable and resilient ways. Learning by imagining that things could be different when we re-prioritize human values and intentions embedded in objects, technology, material and social context.
Our relationship with technology is expanding.
Adaptive, always-on technology of connected world is becoming more than a tool, it is becoming our companion and active participant in unfolding, new techno-social situations.
Experience with technology as a companion invites opportunities to encounter the world in ways that previously were not possible, inviting new relations, new services, moments of emotional awareness, adding value, and inviting meaning into everyday situations.
We see connected world as a place full of potential for surprise, imagination, and possibility for new relations, where people and technology together unlock experiential potential of every moment.
02. Context One: Techno-social situation
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Techno-social situation is an experience design space where technology starts to participate in context of social relations, beyond isolated tasks, inviting moments of magic and purpose to everyday context.
Techno-social situation is a design perspective that moves into focus human goals, values, intentions, and context, as active resource for designing how technology participate in human experience.
Techno-social situation is about technology and design, intentionally making room for the new, compelling human experiences, that can differentiate what otherwise would be a conventional function.
Techno-social situation perspective invites a view of the world as an open, emergent place where every person and thing is always in a dynamic process of becoming, involved in fluid relations, always open to new possibilities and to what’s next.
Techno-social situation is an emergent design space, inviting new forms of relation between people, objects and environment and making experience of connected world tangible and disarmingly human.
Connected world is a place full of potential for surprise, imagination, and possibility for new relations, where people and technology together unlock experiential potential of every moment.
03. Context Two: in-between stories
Our relationship with technology is expanding. We are no longer just using technology. We are living with technology. We are interacting with technology that is less like waiting to be used tool, and a more like always-on, adaptive entity, participating in larger ecosystems of human experience.
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Human experience in the world mediated by technology is expanding. Human goals of connected experience are expanding beyond the narrow focus on optimizing tasks, into richer relation with context of human goals, intentions and values.
Scope of experience design is expanding. From focus on one-to-one interactions to inviting always-on, adaptive, new relations with the world around.
We are in-between stories. In-between narratives, organizing how we make sense of the world we live in and in-between discourses framing the roles technology can play in human experience.
The old narrative - technology as a passive, waiting to be used tool - is losing its ability to inspire the future, and is holding back new possibilities and innovation.
To fully unlock experiential possibilities of our expanding relationship with adaptive, always-on technology we need a new framework, new narrative - able to inspire new expectations and possibilities.
This is an amazing opportunity for products and systems to participate in this transformative moment. Opportunity to inspire new expectations and distinctive human experiences inviting new roles that connected and responsive products and systems can play in our lives.
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We interact with digital objects that are less like passive tools and more like networked, always-on, responsive entities, that are receiving input from the world around them, not just from a single user. Our relationship with them no longer can be fully understood through one-to-one instrumental tasks and functions of a tool. Yet our collective imagination is stuck in “tool/command/control” framework, not recognizing a very different design context.
This inevitably will change because human goals of designing connected experiences are expanding beyond the narrow focus on optimizing isolated tasks, into richer relations with intentions, values, and relations, in social and material context of everyday situations.
We are entering a world where technologically mediated objects and systems can become more than just utilitarian solutions, where objects and systems become adaptable companions of shared human experiences.
04. Towards the new narrative: Technology as our companion
Adaptive, always-on technology of connected world, becomes more than a tool; it becomes our companion and active participant in techno-social situation.
Technology as companion can show us new aspects of reality, intentionally reveal aspects of situation, and point to unseen or taken for granted qualities.
Technology as Companion can help us engage with possible human goals of experience, not just with isolated, instrumental tasks and functions.
Experience with technology as companion is about helping people in finding their own, unique view of the situation, leaving space to inhabit the experience with their own humanity, purpose and meaning.
Companion doesn’t just facilitate the task, but supports our emotional and ethical response to the situation.
Experience with technology as companion invites opportunities to encounter the world in ways that previously were not possible, inviting new relations, new services, moments of emotional awareness, adding value, and inviting meaning into everyday situation.
05. Emerging Expressive Interfaces: from command/control to adaptive influence
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We are in a moment of broader realization that interface is not so much a particular technology but a form of our expanding relationship with technology. These aspects open up exciting new possibilities as part of intentional experience design process.
Designing for experience of living with always-on, responsive technology as our companion becomes more about exploring and participating with active curiosity and open mind for interesting and meaningful encounters and outcomes, fostering openings for initiative, and adaptive influence over the situation.
Realization that we don’t just use technology but we are living with technology allows for a new ways of seeing and thinking about human experience in connected world. Life is more than a task to be efficiently completed through series of commands and controls. The taken for granted assumptions of “command/control paradigm” when applied to how we design experiences with adaptive technology are not capable to unlock new possibilities of meaningful human experiences in emerging techno-social situations. Narrowly productivity-centric conventions are also not good enough to unlock possibilities of adaptive technology to invite new services and new meaningful moments of shared experience of living with technology and engage us with human goals rather than just narrow tasks.
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Expressive/impressive interface is about resonating with our intentions and emotions, not just command/control over automated tasks and sequences.
Shift in perspective, recognizing life as more than “permanent task-mode” opens up new opportunities for experience design to expand expressive interaction space, inviting new forms of emotional resonance that is closer to how we make sense of the situation and relate to one another and world around us, through expressions, impressions, and influence /not through commanding and controlling others/.
Expressions are better at conveying inner states of always-on technology and its essential properties, providing context for interpretations, generating expectations and resonating with our intentions and emotions.
06. Surplus of social possibility
There is always a surplus of social possibility to any situation and object that is not revealed by current interaction patterns.
In connected world objects have unrealized potential to invite novel experiential narratives and behavioral scripts emerging directly through product use in everyday context.
Adaptive technology of connected world have ability to transform space into shared field for transient social encounters and relations, recasting product as active participant of shared experience.
New capabilities and emergent expectations allow technology to participate in social encounters not just tasks.
We need better relations with the world and with each other.
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Collaborative encounters create shared understanding, recognizable participatory patterns, behavioral scripts and energies.
By taking the first step, technology produces meaningful unexpectedness, in otherwise familiar and taken for granted context, and by doing so, suspends daily automatism, revealing interdependencies and awakening our participatory sensibility.
This creates a meaningful distinction in otherwise technological conventional categories of products, systems and services, allowing them to participate in social context of use.
Relational values emerging from collaborative encounters tend to remain in the community where they were produced, becoming social practice, and they form the relational component of the “social infrastructure” available to a community to participate in, expanding goals and value of connected products able to by design participate in these relations.
These fostering new experiential narratives, notions (such as meaningful unexpectedness, social reality surplus, collaborative encounters) are helping us design meaningful experiences in the new techno-social context and reimagine the role that connected objects and systems can play in a community and in people’s lives.
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07. Environment as active resource and interface
In connected world, environment isn’t a passive background, but an active resource with persistent possibilities for action, new encounters, and experiential narratives.
Environment become an adaptive interface of always-on technology that is no longer just a means for controlling and commanding our experience with technology.
This adaptive and expressive interface forms a shared context for action in which humans and technology are active participants, with a license to take a first step.
08. Mobility commons: connected vehicle in connected world as adaptive collaborative asset
Unlocking experiential potential of V2X (vehicle to everything) connectivity unfolds through investigation of new techno-social situations that connected vehicle is starting to participate.
Technology is part of social practice — its informed by shared values and intentionally /even if we are not aware of this intention/ designates relations and facilitates transient collaborations through behavioral scripts embedded in objects and systems.
These values and intentions need to be always included as active resource in design process.
New, adaptive capabilities allow technology to participate in social encounters, not just tasks. These encounters can create shared understanding, recognizable participatory patterns, new forms of social presence, behavioral scripts, and provide new energies and ways of interacting with one another in material and social context of a community.
Relational value emerging from collaborative encounters tend to remain in the community where they were produced, becoming recognizable patterns of social practice. This is a great opportunity for connected vehicles to be defined not just by how they are connected to smart infrastructure, but how they can participate in everyday mobility as a community practice.
Connected vehicles have opportunity to became a dynamic, collaborative, community asset, actively participating in mobility as everyday social practice, where V2X, X = social practice.
Adaptive technology of connected vehicle can take a benevolent first step, expressing new forms of social presence, inviting moments of meaningful unexpectedness and delightful surprises, supporting courtesy and revealing participatory and collaborative opportunities.
09. Imagination as transformative design energy
We are in a moment when we need to continue learning new things and new ways how to put this world back together, in equitable and resilient ways:
Learning by imagining that things could be different when we re-prioritize human values and intentions embedded in objects, technology, material and social context.
It’s why values and ethics become not only a critical lens during our design inquiry but also a site for design intervention and a path for making room for more possibilities.
Intentionally engaging in design transformation processes requires social imagination. Our design intentionally investigates how objects can act as disarming instigators of embodied social values and relations - shared values like curtesy, civility and social collaboration - making room for intentional, new possibilities.
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Learning is a continues capacity and source of energy in design. To seek something new, we need new learning tools, we need to consciously expand the constrains of what is given, especially narrowly controlling our design imagination systems of assumptions about the role objects and systems can play in our lives and relations.
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Empathy and imagination are closely related with capacity to engage us in richer relation with what makes us human, beyond the surface of conventional assumptions. Empathy is a form of learning and research to imagine future relations and feelings.
We apply imagination as design process, linking tangible dimension and emotional detail with intentional meaning in an open construction of meaningful experience situation.
Imagination is an antidote to formulas, preconceptions and givens that can keep design process trapped in conformity of comfortable to follow conventions.
Imagination is the most advanced design energy of connected world.
We apply imagination as strategically disruptive perspective, revealing new possibilities, new roles and relations through which products or systems can become active participants of shared human experience.
Imagination offers transformative design energy for construction of meaningful experience situation in several ways:
Imagination as a disruptive, strategic design energy for new organization of meaning.
Imagination as path to emotional insight and emotional essence of situations that do not yet exist: emotional possibility.
Imagination as experiential currency of connected world.
We apply imagination as a capacity and process to gain insight that transforms our way of understanding the world.
Imagination let us see our relation with technology and human experience as open and always becoming. Through a lens of techno-social situation with surplus of social possibility to foster meaningful relations with the world around. Making new possibilities a persistent driver of design process.
To be a designer in this transformative moment is to be part of architecting the new discourse, new way of seeing the world, new way of thinking to help us make sense of our expanding relationship with the adaptive and always-on technology.
Design is about intentionally creating new possibilities, that allow us to start putting this world back together in equitable and resilient ways.
To unlock new experiential possibilities design needs to inspire new expectations. Including our own.
Imagination is the most advanced design process we have.
Bibliography
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City as Interface, by Martin De Waal
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