When the most powerful man at the most powerful data company says he has no solution to AI problems? In this Futurism article, Sundar Pichai of Google says they cannot prevent their Artificial Intelligence systems from fabricating answers. <edit June 2024> When the most powerful man at the most powerful hardware/software company says he has […]
Author: Alastair Somerville
Fighting fascism with shifting roles in life
Just finished Peter Pomerantsev’s ‘How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler’ and one of the points made in final chapter is not just about the narratives and communities we share but the identities we hold.
What authoritarians often offer is a stability of role or identity when life seems to be changing too much or too fast. This is comforting and confidence building for people who feel lost when they thought they would be powerful.
What Sefton Delmer (in charge of deceptive propaganda radio stations) was interested in was enabling identities and roles to become exaggerated and ridiculous. To show we choose our personal identities and individual autonomy can be in shifting identities. This relates to modern research, by Shoda, on contextual identities and how people shift and switch dependent on where they are, who they are with and what they are doing.
We help people by showing the roles and categories they are allocated or forced to choose are not all they are. Autonomy and anti-authoritarianism is in playing different roles and recognising those deliberate shifts.
Anxiety not injury
Floating Bus Stops are back in the news. This report Floating bus stops to be banned in the Guardian yesterday on their possible ban. One argument that comes up is that relatively few people with disabilities are killed or injured at such stops while many bicyclists are killed and injured on London’s roads. Partially this […]
Frame & Name
A lot of accessibility and wayfinding work I do with organisations is at the start of projects. It is a form of content design audit and (tho I hate this word) chunking. It is Frame & Name. Frame & Name Frame & Name is how systems & institutions make their zones of activity perceivable and […]
AI Iron Triangle
I was reading another interview with Sam Altman about Artificial Intelligence (AI). He spoke of the huge cost of creating a generalised AI: maybe $5billion, maybe $50 billion. He didn’t talk of the extraordinary energy costs of even a single prompt. It is clearly all Silicon Valley BS. After the last few years, it is […]
3Topia
I just finished a project with the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK and one thing that came up was how to shift teams and projects into alternative patterns of participatory design. The tools for such design are well known but how to access them from existing structures and then integrate them into new […]
Equity and Inclusive Design
Floating Bus Stops represent what I distrust about Inclusive Design processes (compared to Accessible Design methods). I was reminded by a speech this week by Lord Holmes (who is blind) in the House of Lords about the dangers of such bus stop designs for blind and visually impaired people. Accessible issues Accessible Design has issues. […]
Sofas Help
I was running a workshop on imagining futures for a German museum last week. We walked around the building and spent a lot of time going down long corridors (and back again). When we stopped, we stood. Museums can be strangely loathe to enable visitor comfort. It is like a version of Defensive Architecture: the […]
UX Copenhagen workshop information
This is a page for people attending the workshop remotely but it may be helpful to anyone in the room too. Thanks for coming along. This page has some some questions to look at and materials for you to download (and print if you want). This workshop is being held in a cinema so, for […]
No One, No Where Bots
I have just started a new project with a German museum. They have sent me their strategic and visitor engagement plans in a couple of PowerPoint slidedecks. I have used Google Translate to try and understand what is being communicated in my own language of English. This machine-translation is very useful but also useless. Whilst […]