#session4

Step into the depths of despair, Celeste, Marius, and Ibrynn. Your encounters in the village unravel the darkness I've woven. The whispers of vampiric secrets entice, as you navigate the web of enigmatic shopkeepers, Koopman Bilrath and Perry Whimple. Ismark's desperate plea reveals the fragility of life, setting you on a perilous path of intrigue and malevolence.

In this session, the key conceptual question that underlies all else was about direction. Whether in politics, design, philosophy, or technological innovation, the participants tried to estimate a current point of view and the direction we are heading towards depending on personal wishes for the future: What world do I want to live in? Can I change the future? Can I change the past? Do humans have any value and how many should exist for how long? Who am I anyway? How should I live? Who is to decide? Do I love, hate, fear…? Why? What, if anything would I change in the world, with people, with me? What role do narratives play in the fiction? 

A Wish is a desire for a thing or ability, an aspiration or at least the hope of a change in reality or perception or the achievement of a goal for yourself or for another. 

What happens if an AI starts to wish for something? Does the meaning of wish then lose all its sense for human? 
Maybe then the AI really understood human probably better than we do and also got the meaning of wishes. But does a full functional AI need to wish for something anyway? Or is it that rational to see it as a unuseful ability of humankind? 
The GIF below symbolise an AI creating wishes. Creating wishes in such a time lapse already questions the whole meaning of wishes.

In this experiment, I wanted to confirm my intuitive thoughts about what's more important for humanity when it comes to a bigger scale. I was questioning myself if the human is always this very center of any design process... but I didn't want to get my perspective from my human scale point of view. What I did: I opened google earth, rotate the globe and started from a random location in the south of Europe, then I just followed the traces, streets, avenues, pathways created by humans or by nature, intuitively I chose the tracks to follow and after 30 min straight of no thinking just following I get to some random location in Ukraine. My result: I confirm my initial assumption, when it comes to a bigger scale is everything about adaptability to the surroundings, the human does not have to be the very center of every single design process.

One of Marcels main points was, that the human should be the very center of the design process. He proposed to always have a look at the human needs and decide according to them. In this context he talked about Maslow’s theory of human needs. I always wandered, why this is shown as an hierarchy in a pyramid, I thought this might not be the right visualization. Are human needs always the same? Can you just say, that food is a higher need than safety? Do we survive without love? So I tried to find a new visualization, which I thought was important, in order to define things new, and therefore think in a different way. Later on I asked myself, how does this new hierarchy or non-hierarchy influence our design process. The dependence of the situation, that forms our needs, needs a design, that is flexible enough to adapt to this and even think of situations that you could not think of. I decided to show the pictures of my notebook in a video, because I think you can follow the way of thinking better this way, than just reading it.

I wish for everybody to be more aware of their actions, of the dimension they have and of the way they reflect on our sorroundings. I started wondering what kind of scenario could capture this idea and how it would look like.