Design and Future

Caste, Gender, and Technology

Introduction

We explore a fictional world of our making through the lens of speculative design, a form of design that tackles broad social concerns, focuses on alternate realities, and generates thinking that can help create goods and services for those scenarios. The idea is a little more complicated than it may seem; however, like all things design, it thrives on creativity and seeks to open up new perspectives on topics that are often underrepresented or misunderstood; it builds space for discussion and debate about alternate or potential forms of being, a means to stimulate and enable people’s imaginations to flow freely. Design speculation catalyzed our understanding of our relationship with reality, human life, and interaction with other technologies to be redefined collectively.

Individual Lines of Inquiry

Animesh Bondre: Looking at two ways of building a line of inquiry

• Using mixed-media to carry out and communicate our research
• How can we make a speculative design more participatory? Can we co-design the future for a better present?

Using these two inquiries, he created a line of inquiry to design mixed-media probes/toolkits to make the speculative design more participatory. He was also interested in gender, hence wanted to explore this inquiry in that context.

Anshul Jain: How one could become a better male feminist. Themes of which were looked at in how privilege can be used as a tool for doing good.

Mayank Patel: Humanoid robots evolve from command language then semi-autonomous, and now it’s going to be completely autonomous like a human. Will it become a family member?

Priya Sharma: She’s a line of inquiry mainly focused on the future of social media. It was not a very refined line of inquiry, and there were various sub-topics that she had in mind. She wanted to explore one or more of these through this project.

• What is the future of social media?
• How will social media change the way we meet new people and interact with them in the future?
• Easy access to data about and data privacy in future social media platforms. (an idea)

Sanjana Kothapalli: She’s line of inquiry was to understand how technology and caste intersect.

• Is new technology furthering the divide in caste, or is it more inclusive?
• Do we design products or services with keeping caste diversities in mind?
• Or do we create new things entirely to serve people in different castes?

The Artefacts

Neural Dust:
Neural dust is an instance of the neural link. This version specs of silicon electrodes sprinkled across the human brain through a quick and simple procedure. These tiny electrodes intercept firing patterns of neurons in different situations. They transfer it to enabler, another device in the world, which will be explained further. The enabler collects the information from neural dust and transmits this information to the AI cloud. It also retrieves information and fires neurons via neural dust to stimulate neurons to feed new information from the cloud.

Neural Dust

Social Enabler:
This device works with the neural dust. The enabler collects information from the neural dust and transmits this information to an AI cloud. It also retrieves information from the cloud and fires neurons via the neural dust to stimulate the neurons to feed it new information. The enabler is the device that interprets and communicates the data it receives from and for the neural link.

Due to its functionality, this device goes around the head of a person in the future; with this device's help, people will be able to share their feelings and experiences with others. Your thoughts become the information that you share with people. It’s just like interacting but without talking. This device can only be activated by manually touching it when a person wants to share or access information.

Materials that can be used — Aerogel, amorphous material

Social Enabler

Identity Slate:
The Identity slate is provided by a central power that gives one access to The Identity slate is provided by a central power that gives one access to design their own identity. An identity like gender is assigned biologically, but those with the neural link believe in a more fluid identity owing to access to various gender experiences, i.e., the right to design your identity. This right brings the responsibility to uplift those whose identities are not as malleable with equal access to opportunities. Identity can change multiple times based on the environment and situations they are subject to. Since people make it also their responsibility to dispose of or cremate the essence, they are no longer using.

This identity slate will take time to reach the last mile considering the practicalities of implementing it across regions(tech, funds, demography). The slate provides advantages of having access to services in this world (Neuralink). Since identities are diverse, but there are certain pure identities like red, blue, green, this will create division in this world for the people who are not pure.

The identity slate works on three values (Red, Green, Blue). Through the phase of life, one gains different values, which makes the identity of that person. The value identity spectrum is vast, but there will be pure identities that will exist in the world, just, e.g.:- Red, blue, Green. This causes there to be a division amongst the people. Every color (value) is associated with a number, just like the RGB code for colors.

The association of numbers and color to people might give rise to greater surveillance and cleansing of people who are not of pure color. But who will do it, the central power or the people in this world?

Identity Slate

Huro (aka HoloRobo):
Several decades ago, a human would make a painting or a statue to remember someone. In today’s day and age, to remember something or someone, we have several mediums such as photos, videos, etc. In the future, there will be a Huro, a robot that will house the personality of a person, whether they are alive or not.

Huro

Interactive Points:
Interactive points in the world that a person can engage with, a marker of some sort, be it an image, an object, a sound, or any other recognizable form of media that can trigger the neural link to detect and load the experience attached to it. This kind of engagement with the world required the neural link to have the technology to read these kinds of input, which the research looks at.

Interactive Points

The World

The world imagined is about 50–60 years in the future. Society’s people are divided based on new beginnings for technology-driven marginalization, similar to what caste does today. Neural dust is the brand new technology in neural links. The neural link works with two ends — the human end (neural dust and its previous versions) and the technology end (enabler and its prior versions). The neural link serves as a brain to brain interface that evolved from brain-machine interfaces through auditory, visual, and haptic experiences. With the development of signal transmission and simulation technology, it became possible to receive and read signals from the brain and transmit it to the brain.

Having the neural link in this society implies that you can connect to an AI cloud and have permission-based access to what different people know, feel, think, and sense. It is a human-driven step in the evolution of the human species — adding to the limbic system, neocortex, and then the cloud AI which can be summoned to know new information or make new connections. Interaction points across various neural links help people quickly navigate to a source of information.

Neural link

Using the neural link could provide different experiences based on bandwidth accessibility (the number of neurons it can intercept) and the advancement of the brain interface (owing to the presence of multiple technologies other than the neural dust; past versions of the enabler technology as well) :

Level 5
This section consists of people with no neural link.

Level 4
When you want to know a fact, you call on the cloud for that information — like googling something with your brain — and the answer, in text, appears in your mind’s eye. What you do in our current reality, except it all happens in your head.

Level 3
You want to know a fact. You call on the cloud for that info, and then a second later, you ​know ​it. No reading was involved — it was more like the way you’d recall something from memory.

Level 2
You know the fact you want to know, the second you want it. You don’t even know if it came from the cloud or if it was stored in your brain. You can essentially treat the whole cloud-like your brain. You don’t know all the information — your brain could never fit it all — but any time you want to know something, it downloads into your consciousness so seamlessly and quickly, it’s as if it were there all along.

Level 1
Beyond just knowing facts, you can deeply ​understand​ anything you want to, in a complex way. You will have your opinions and analysis immediately after you consume new content.

When you think on any of the first four levels, it is like an extension of your body and evolution of your senses — it is not like seeing or feeling or hearing when we do it with our extended self, but like a new sense. As AI governs the cloud, humans being able to be a part of this AI makes it work for both parties (humans & AI) because you can feel and think like other people who are on the same level, there is a heightened sense of empathy but only for that level. There is a sense of charity and togetherness, but it is restricted.

These levels create a divide of functioning in society. Level 1 being the most evolved form to level 5 being the least. The people who don’t have access to neural links are not even considered part of this ‘evolution,’ forming a new caste system.

As we move into this future, the growing dependence on technology furthers this divide; the marginalized section of society is still the last to receive any development. Suppose you happen to belong to more than one marginalized community. In that case, there is a high chance that you receive any new developments (technology, healthcare, transport, etc.) of any kind very late, if at all. So in 2070, people who have been discriminated against tend to belong to level 5.

Gender fluidity is a concept more pervasive in levels 1 through 4 due to the neural link capabilities giving people the option to experience what it feels like to live as a person of a different gender. So the first four levels empathize and identify with other genders on their levels. People on the first four levels are free to change their identities from time to time via the identity slate, but discrimination based on the levels is still prevalent. Owing to the lack of access to such experiences, society’s views have progressed at different rates leaving those in level 5 to grow their understanding and beliefs at the same rate as it does today.

When people die in this world, they can feed their memories onto the cloud AI and/or allow the enabler to feed and learn the pattern of neurons fired to conserve consciousness. This helps the friends and family of the dead person revisit their kin who are no longer part of the mortal world and find advice and solace based on what they were like at a particular time of their life since they came into possession of neural link. Huro allows this to happen. Huro accesses the memories stored (levels 3 & 4) or consciousness (level 1 & 2) when people want to meet their dead kin. The invention of Huro added to the complexities of this world further with the consciousness of powerful people who are no longer alive still wanting to communicate how the world should function based on their understanding of what is right (this section is explored more while talking of one version of the game, i.e., exploration 3).

The consciousness of influential people emerged to influence how society and politics function, which caused people’s thinking in level 1 and level 2 to be influenced more than before the existence of these technologies. This makes it much easier to polarise level 1, even with the power they hold in this world. It is much easier to intercept the neurons and feed false information that would benefit a powerful figure (rigging the election by influencing people at top levels hence becomes very easy). The sharing of information among the levels is so fascinating yet personal that people ended up living in their artificial reality, taking hyper normalization to a whole new level. Each level lives in its polarised imagined reality. In this context, people without neural links or level 5 have a better idea about the real world.

Our team wanted to venture into these complexities of different neural link levels, gender fluidity, polarization, and imagined realities. Even though level 5 is the most discriminated against, they know how the world functions. We wanted to find ways to feel equipped enough to challenge existing ideologies and change the systems to a world that served everyone more equitably (we toyed with this idea in exploration 3).

Prototyping

What were our objectives while prototyping?

1. People should have a sense of what marginalization is.
2. Caste has to be tried to reimagine through society’s metaphor; the concept of gender is brought in with colors.

What directions did we consider?

1. People navigate through different levels of society; each of the players would have different gender; with new situations, you can act accordingly to save your unity or otherwise.

• We imagined it happening in 2 ways — the world or context of an organization.
• We created ‘the board,’ which is a metaphor for our marginalization. The Holorobo and the existence of the board possible in the world

2. Data breach and identities are out; Government coup by lower classes; Hitler’s consciousness wakes up on the board and hunting of lower classes begins; Food scarcity is hidden by the board & government.

3. Star-shaped graph board.

What ideas did we try out?

Our first ideas about the game were to disconnect it from the reality we are familiar with so that the players do not get stuck in the logic of how the worlds overlap. The above images show different ideas that we were looking at while designing the game. We started ideating with the colorful honeycomb structure moving on to graphs where the idea was similar to that of cops and robbers, which later evolved into people capturing other players placed on different vertices by changing their colors. We named this game “Come Here.” The final structures are shown below.

We started taking inspiration from our earlier game, “Come here.”There were interesting associations that were made by people while playtesting it. The changing of color, forming alliances were the points that had emerged. We could see these associations as a metaphor for our world. While designing the world, we aimed to talk about caste, gender, and technology with metaphors rather than directly talking about them. This gives us the freedom to experiment as well as exciting associations and interpretations while playing this game. We picked the circle and line concept as we saw interesting metaphors that might evolve into that context and started exploring different ways of doing it.

Exploration​ 1
The below image shows a structure where using the neural link, one had to create their own identity/property/area by converting the vertices into their color. The triangle indicates the identity/property/area belonging to the players. Each color starts with the same power, but they gain an unfair advantage under starting before other colors. We wanted to show how first player bias turns into power for the player who goes first, who then ends up occupying a majority. Of the space on the board and the ones who went later are sidelined. This idea emerged from how people of lower caste are given rooms outside the central area of residency. They end up being sidelined from the resources, so by being denied access to help from the beginning; they suffer more later. But while playtesting, the intention was not very clear to the players, and it did not feel like we were doing justice to all the other artifacts in our world.

Exploration​ 2
We tried taking a traditional board game approach, i.e., a square/rectangular board with boxes. The idea was to divide players into two teams — one with a neural link and others without a neural link. The main elements of this board game were:

• Power cards- the artifacts in the world that we imagined.
• Task cards — Each team would be assigned a task to perform.
• Rule card — Each player would move ahead in the game according to the rules they need to follow.

In this game, each team would be given a task (e.g., If team 1 needs to save the world, then team 2 would be tasked with earning as much money as possible by consuming all the resources) that the players need to complete to win the game successfully. Each team would have a leader, and only the leader would know what the task is. Other players in the team should follow the instructions given by the leader. Based on the set of rules (a Rule card for each player), each player can follow or refuse certain instructions given to them. In this game, depending on the rules in the rule card, players in a team are further divided into levels creating a hierarchy within the teams.

The board has boxes/tiles, and the players would move ahead with a roll of a dice. There are certain tasks on each tile. Each player from both the team would come to a common space on the board — space in the center and perform the same task, like a face-off. The winner gets the power card of the player who lost.

We did not think further on this idea as we thought that things were becoming complex, so we started exploring other ideas.

Exploration​ 3
We felt stuck while ideating our game world and so decided to step away from the circle and line idea we had picked from our game” Come here.”

We visualized the identity slate as four personas with different powers. There is a persona in each round, which is the leader and influences the world the most. The leader’s decision affects the world. With each round, there are events that the leader can hide or reveal to the rest of the player. The Holo robot records the decision. These discussions cumulatively affect what events occur in the world. The idea behind this was to show hyper normalization. We wanted to have a voting mechanism to elect the leader and use the neural link to influence people and polarize them to get votes but could not execute with it.

Exploration 4
The idea behind this game came after talking with Jahnavi Koganti and Saili Gupte about how we can design a game to build complexities, and there doesn’t necessarily have to be a win-lose situation as the conclusion. We can make the players feel miserable by the end of the game, which could be the game's aim. So building on that idea, we started with the idea of a game titled “Propaganda.” It was about how people would have a selfish interest behind something straightforward. Because of that, the world would retaliate and become harder for everyone to live in; it would end up creating complexities for themselves. In this game, one has to reach from an assigned circle on the left to one on the right. Every player would have to reach from one end to the other, and their actions would create different challenges, which are shown in orange for the other players. This was the idea, but we could not find a definite conclusion to the game; we could not proceed with it, nor could we connect it to the world we had built, so we put this idea on hold.

Exploration 5
We dropped the idea of assigning colors to the circle and added the concept of a door. Each door has a particular set of colors assigned to it. So when a player faces the door, they need the permission of the colors assigned to the door to pass through it. The players with the colors assigned to the door can decide if they want to let the player pass through their door or not. The idea was to see if players reach the other end as early as possible by cooperating or sabotaging the other players to get to the end first. This would have some people allow or deny permission to pass through the door leading to the players taking more steps to reach the end. The game would repeat until the players realize that the only way to win is to work together. This was a step in the right direction, but the players took too long to figure out the goal on their own, and so we decided to look at other ways to make this idea work.

Integration

To bring our project full circle, we would integrate the world we had built into the developing game.

The game is called ​Neurotic​. When the players start playing the game, the world is neurotic. The players' objective is to get from the start to the endpoint and, in the process, reduce the neuroticism of the world. It would help if you played this game, three players, and one moderator.

This game motivates players to interact with each other and figure out ways to make the system less neurotic. In the game, players are assigned characters of different colors to move forward one step at a time. Players can move from one node (circle/point) to another directly connected through a line. There are different doors placed between some of the nodes, which players can only cross if the moderator allows them to do so based on some logic unknown to them. There are three kinds of doors; let’s call them D1, D2, and D3. D1 allows only one player to pass, D2 allows two players to pass, and D3 allows all the players to pass. Moderators can decide which doors allow which colors when the game begins, and this remains constant throughout the game. There are some nodes (points) in the game called the ‘Brain Points’, where players can choose to switch their color with other players, allowing them to pass on their ability to pass through different doors.

During the game, players should observe and figure out which color is allowed to pass through which door. As players do this, they can plan and strategize on moving forward to make the game less neurotic. If players fail to do so, the system becomes more neurotic, due to which the number of doors increases. The game is complete when the player who is allowed to pass through only one kind of door (D3) reaches the end before the others, which is only possible if the other players help them. The game continues (up to any number of rounds) till this happens.

Rules:

• Every player has to move each turn from one node to another.
• Say “knock-knock” to ask the moderator to pass a door.
• The game ends when the players do the task to end neuroticism.
• When you reach the ‘Brainpoint,’ you can ask other players to exchange their color. Should they agree, the colors are exchanged.

Board layout:

The board for this game is simple because it looks but complex in the way it functions. The game looks like a grid, which mainly has three elements on the board, Lines, Circles, and Doors. Each circle is connected to one or many other circles on the board through a line each. Circles have three variations — Red, Grey, and Black with Brain Icon. Red circles are the start and end, grey is the ones without any special feature, and Black ones allow players to exchange colors. There are three variations of doors that are placed on the lines between any two circles/nodes.

Conclusion

This project was interesting to us because it challenged our notion of what a game could be. As we zeroed in on what we wanted our players to experience and engage with, it became clear that our game was on the right track to achieve its objectives for the time frame.

Owing to the nature of the game, the absence of replayability did not afford the players to get better at the game, which is an area worth looking at in the future. Its intention to encourage the players to reflect aims to better their understanding of marginalization, which they claim it did as it left them with lingering thoughts about the power dynamics that exist in their own reality, a piece we would like to maintain in future versions should we pick this project up again. We would like to believe we did some level of justice to what we had set out to achieve, and hence we would like to conclude with what our professor said to us at the end of this studio, “Operation successful, patient alive.”