design-dump

[design-dump]

FaceTime Epiphany

From September 2021 till February 2022, the hours I spent facetiming people (those who don’t live in the UK) easily exceed 200, at the least. During most of these hours, I’m fully engaged in conversations either through my phone, laptop, or iPad. 

Let’s visualize this more vividly. I’m sitting in front of my desk or laying down in my bed when making these calls. My emotional frequency tends to go up since my friend and I are catching up on interesting or uninteresting life events. This means I’m laughing 50% of the time, swearing (in a nice way) 20% of the time, and rolling my eyes 30% of the time to my friend. Who’s trapped inside a screen. 

My parents and grandparents’ go-to-phrase whenever we facetime is: 

“We’re blessed to live in such a nice world, being able to talk to people who live thousands of miles away. It’s as if you’re right in front of me..” 

Hearing this always makes me feel ambivalent. Without our facetime technology, I wouldn’t have been able to rant to my mom about my flat’s kitchen or listen to my friend’s hook-up drama in America. Yet as I find myself pathetically pouring my heart out to a digital screen containing the image of my friend or family, it terrifies me to know that my mind already equates this digital image with an actual human being. 

With facetime culture already so prominent, can we really define a society of virtual reality, a world where we can access everything — humans, objects, services — with a simple click, as absurd? The day I learned of the <<click world>>, an idea proposed by our beloved cynical lecturer Sean Hall, I reflected on the likelihood of this cynical joke and realized that it was too possible to laugh it off. 

When will technological advancements ever stop, or should they even?

Should designers continuously solve problems? 

When will someone say “we’ve come too far,” and is that now? 

Alexander Graham Bell definitely wouldn’t have imagined that his improvement of the telegraph would replace human connections 150 years later. All actions, or designs, have consequences, deliberate or not. What will the consequences of our current FaceTime evolve to in the next 150 years?

FaceTime is neither participatory nor critical design, at least from its original intentions. It’s a product of affirmative design, a traditional design that closely identifies with problem solving. Yet the questions posed above show that FaceTime can partake in critical design, even if it wasn’t “critically” designed from the start. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby distinguish affirmative and critical design as problem-solving and problem-finding, and I think that all designs can fall under both branches:

Most designs are created to target a specific problem and hence can be categorized as affirmative design. 

Yet these affirmative designs inevitably contribute to the creation of a larger problem, regardless of its original intentions, just like the telephone from the 1870s which became FaceTime, currently threatening physical human connection. 

All designs have consequences and hence open the door to the finding of a new problem, executing the role of critical design. 

Of course, it can also be that this is all wrong and I’m proving that I haven’t properly understood the concept of participatory or critical design from the last lecture. Hopefully it’s not the latter.

Bibliography

1. Gonsher, Ian. “Beyond Design Thinking:” Critical Design Critical Futures - Beyond Design Thinking: http://www.cd-cf.org/articles/beyond-design-thinking/.

2. History.com Editors. “Alexander Graham Bell Patents the Telephone.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 24 Nov. 2009, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/alexander-graham-bell-patents-the-telephone.

3. One of Sean Hall’s lecture about the <<click world>>; cannot remember the date but sometime in late 2021.