Our Shop is a Platform for…

…Democratizing Technology Production to create Digital Diversity

Recently we had a go at backcasting our shop concept from where we would like to be in one year. This exercise caused us to question and define what the core motivation/concept of our shop is. The following is the documentation of the conversation that followed.

A Platform to speculate:

For every person to imagine a future of technology and realize them.
It adds another possibility of future technology to the currently monopolised future vision of industries.
Why this is desirable?
Diversifying ideas, possibilities and future visions of technology -> let our future technology become more resilient and adaptive to its environment

A Place to discuss:

We also care about future of making. The shop proposes one type of alternative making process. Our intention is not about creating “a solution” to our current production system, but rather to create a discussion by placing concrete alternative fact and stimulate discussions. The shop itself represents old style production model, resembling a tailor shop. We envision that we will need to come up with completely new types of production model and seek for discussion among the makers, designers, consumers and producers. Currently we are leaning more and more toward one type of production system, which is industry based mass production. We hope that in future, there are many other types of production systems that live side by side. This diversity will let our society to become more resilient.

Comparison to Biodiversity

taxonomic diversity (usually measured at the species diversity level)
ecological diversity often viewed from the perspective of ecosystem diversity
morphological diversity which stems from genetic diversity and molecular diversity
functional diversity which is a measure of the number of functionally disparate species within a population

GOOD vs. BAD?
INDIVIDUAL AGENCY vs. SOCIAL AGENCY?
Free will????

Comparison to the speculative/critical design:
In speculative designs, it is the designer who speculates the alternative future and designs the objects, that pose discussion to the society. In our approach, we invite people to cast their speculation to the future technology in current time. The shop is a platform for the speculation and it exists in real-life.

Using Technology to create diversity?
There could be even a new method to create diversified alternative using technology such as machine learning. The current mono culture model of industry driven, single future scenario is as if running a machine with hand-coded threshold. Instead, it can have adaptive behavior of machine learning system.

Technology and our biased impression
We are biased with some negative image of technology, such as big brother of 1984 by George Orwell. What if he was wrong? We may not be able to see the possibility of machine surveillance technology without reminded of very negative scenario he has pointed out. This is one of the examples, but we maybe are biased not to imagine certain alternatives.