This blog post is a reflection of the course and lectures given by Andres Colmenares. The course is an intersection of data/digital driven world and realization of the impacts due to it. It gives you an environment, social and cultural consciousness of using the data which emphasizes on knowing the power and importance of the data driven tools we are using during the master’s.
Data and Metaphors:
Initially, the lecture started with exercise of understanding data through metaphors. This gave us a creative way to compare digitalization with the other elements and how they co-exist. By reading the articles in “Bad Metaphors”, an ongoing series that takes a critical look at the figures of speech or tropes that shuttle between technology and everyday life. I studied about the Bad metaphors on a Journey and reflected on digital impact on human perceptions/journey. The metaphor of “being on a journey” proliferates in advertising copy, as well as across social media. There are more than 30 million Instagram posts tagged #weightlossjourney, along with hundreds of thousands for #debtfreejourney, #yogajourney, #ketojourney, and other logs of self-improvement.
Understanding Digital Sector:
Environmental footprint of the digital sector: The next sessions proceeded with small take aways from video lecture by “Tega Brian” on “The Environment is not a system”. Lecture introduced to new projects and elements like “Half-earth project”, “Google Ai earth”, facts like Ai’s carbon consumption is 5 times the amount consumed by U.S cars. After a pretty informative lecture, myself with my friends Maja and Luisa presented our topic of “Environmental footprint of Digital sector ”. One of the key learnings through the study was the amount of water consumed by ChatGPT and AI and also the critical issue in documenting the carbon footprint of data like data transfers, messages etc. One of the major and funny fact was, deleting mails and clearing them wouldn’t reduce the digital carbon footprint.
Critical design Lab:
Design Fiction – “The practice of creating tangible and evocative prototypes from possible futures, to help discover and represent the consequences of decision making”. As defined, prof. Andres was training us to create futuristic prototypes under the critical design lab. Along with my group mates, I engaged in discussions on the topic ,“ Digital currencies, Digital assistants, Social media” and read using the lenses from Manifesto – Time and Scale over the context of New York city. This gave us a prospective of how the technologies and current digital trends can be projected to the future in a detailed narrative.
I learnt how different digital trends in different cities are creating an impact in the future, like Taiwan and medical facilities through robot, New York and Digital money etc. In detail from New York, the digital media gives the empowerment to individual citizenship to voice out as well as the more number of domains creates a global market all across the world with great opportunities.
Artifacts and Market:
This was one of my favorite part and last session of the course, with the narrative presented, we were asked to make a desktop film using our Future report. Below, you can find the link of the desktop film prepared made with my group mates.
And then, we were able to ideate the props or artifacts designed from our futurism. Our group created a smart glass and watch where you sell your data to buy the moods which you want to experience and visualize it through the lenses.
