Design for Speculative Futures

Description:

We are living in a world of many worlds. Your vivid reality may hold a different meaning for someone with color blindness. Your finger snap might sound like a crashing boulder to another species. From an AI's perspective, you may appear as nothing more than clouds of data points.

In "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Thomas Nagel questions whether we can truly know how others perceive sensations. Can one consciousness truly understand another? Can we genuinely comprehend the experience of other humans, machines, or species?

As humans augment themselves with XR technology, a profound question arises: Can you see what I see? Each person's augmented layers are unique and private by default. But XR can be a permissionless medium—we can perceive the world in any way we choose. No one's permission is needed. In this permissionless future where XR becomes prevalent, will reality fragment further, or will XR help us share experiences more easily? Is this a utopian or dystopian future? How can we coexist in a world of many worlds with XR? What will Reality become?

In this track, through XR art and speculative design, we envision futures that question ethics and explore philosophical insights about our path forward.

Let us celebrate a world of many worlds.

How Might We...

...design a future moment where XR helps us (mis)understand each other in pluralistic ways? Can we understand the perspectives of those with color blindness, autism, bats, ants, biased AI, or even aliens?
...design social encounters where two or more people with XR meet spontaneously—how do they share their reality? What interactions emerge?
...design future XR scenarios that challenge the ontological nature of digital objects in everyday life? Is this digital object real to all or only to me? Who has permission to let them be seen? Design XR-mediated collective behaviors based on the existence of digital objects.
...extend our bodies with XR? XR is extending our bodies to reach beyond physical limits. How can others understand the extended you?
...extend our minds with XR? XR is extending our memory, cognition, and perception. How can others understand the extended you?
...design a festival celebrating a world of many worlds? Choose a subjective sensory system and design a new ritual via XR.
...design experiential futures at the edges of reality that question the truthfulness of our digital realities

Written by Botao Amber Hu from Reality Design Lab