Peeking into alternative futures: What we learned from FutureFest

By Science Practice, 19 March 2015

Last weekend Nesta held their second FutureFest event at Vinopolis, in London. Here are some of the main ideas we picked up from the festival.

Our expectations of robots go beyond their programming.

‘Where are the robots?’ was probably one of the leitmotifs overheard at FutureFest. A mix of curiosity, excitement and fear floated about. What do they look like? What can they do? Are they better at it than us? Are our jobs in danger? Long story short, you apparently have nothing to worry about if you’re a choreographer or funeral attendant, but the rest of us should keep an eye out.


More interesting questions were provoked by some of the installations present at the festival. For example, The Blind Robot humbled expectations by not being able to do anything but create an opportunity for a non-verbal human-machine interaction. The robot explored the visitor’s face in a manner that recalled the way blind people touch faces in order to familiarise themselves with persons. The questions that inevitably followed each of these rather intimate acts were: ‘Can it see my face?’, ‘Does it know what I look like?’. It could do no such things. But these limitations raised a mirror to our heightened expectations about robots and a hidden desire to be seen and understood by them. A similar experiment was ‘My Robot Companion: Familiar’ - a robot able to take on the appearance of any face it sees. This reiterated this vision of robots as entities being able to see us and ultimately reveal ourselves back to us.


Now that we’ve got a better idea of how the mind works, how can we hack it?

Advancements in neuroscience have taken an interesting twist at FutureFest. One of the pervasive ideas was that of tricking the senses to compensate for distance, scarcity or simply convenience. For example, gadgets such as Kissenger - a device for transmitting kisses over the internet, aim to bypass the challenges of distance by simulating touch. Scentee - a fragrance-emitting smartphone add-on, was pitched as a way of tricking your mind into thinking it’s eating, for example, steak when you’re actually on a diet and munching on salad or living on rice as a student. (Not sure how long that trick’s going to last…)


This idea was also present in Emporious - a vision of the Sweetshop of the Future. Here, in a future where cocoa demand outruns supply, a way of compensating for this scarcity is to shape small quantities of chocolate into spacious architectural forms. These shapes would visually make them seem larger, but also allow for a satisfying tasting experience as they would automatically fill your whole mouth with chocolate.


We’re thirsty for new experiences or, at least, for the ability to enjoy the experiences we’re living.

Perhaps as a response to these increasingly simulated experiences, a number of talks and interactions explored the need to feel - to feel something new, something more powerful, or to simply feel. The NEUROSIS ride gave an example of how neuroscience can be used to create more exciting thrills and push us out of our comfort zones; BitterSuite and Tanya Auclair showed how experiences such as listening to classical music can make us feel more intensely via multiple sensory stimulation using sound, taste, and smell. Even the way we experience food is changing. In reaction to everything being digital and perceived through smooth glass, textures are becoming a trending feature. About time, says Dr. Morgaine Gaye, given that the last major textural innovation in confectionery was Pop Rocks in the 70s.


In parallel to this tendency to crank up the intensity of our experiences in order to feel more, Paul Dolan posed a nice complementary challenge. He argued for an approach towards silencing some of these potential distractions and nurturing an internal ability to listen to what we are feeling in the present.

Decentralise everything - from financial systems and politics, to music making.

Whether the talk was about the future of finance, the internet, or politics, the need for decentralisation as a way of involving the wider community and reinstating trust in the system was prevalent. Debates often revolved around the role technology could play in this process. A particularly insightful example of this came from the music industry. Spoek Mathambo, a South African artist, spoke about the decentralisation of music making while introducing his documentary, Future Sounds of Mzansi.


He identified genres of electronic music that developed at the same time that pirated copies of music-making software like Fruityloops was passed around on CDs in South African townships. He also spoke of the importance of online audio distribution platforms like Soundcloud and a South African site called Kasimp3 whose success in spawning new sub-genres is partly due to the fact that it works so well on non-smart phones.

Coding is the language of the 21st century. How to get more people to speak it and be part of the conversation?

Technology is embedded in our day to day lives from the ways in which we communicate with each other, we make transactions, or even express political opinions. Yet as these technologies become increasingly sophisticated, the ability of digitally illiterate individuals to participate and have a say in their creation is limited. Either directly or indirectly, debates bought up the need for an educated - or at least informed - user who can have a say in the development of these technologies and an understanding of their impact.


Coding classes re-emerged as an approach towards encouraging a broader engagement and dialogue from a young age, while other debates focused on encouraging a greater diversity in gender and race among tech creators.


Finally, on a topic closer to home…

How to visualise abstract ideas and avoid ‘dummifying’ data.

The ‘Information is Dutiful’ debate opened up an interesting space for talking about the purpose of data visualisations and the challenges they pose. Panellists included: Francine Bennett (CEO at Mastodon C), Hannah Radler (associate curator at Open Data Institute) and Matthew Falla (partner at Signal | Noise). After the initial presentation of portfolios, the audience asked questions about the standards of sharing and use of patient data in a clinical context. Although a 45-minute debate is not a place where problems of this magnitude can be solved, it was encouraging to see there is already a strong awareness of existing issues around the use of patient data. Another point raised by the audience addressed the risk of ‘dummifying’ data when it is visualised. Although at Science Practice we like to think that it is in fact one of the key responsibilities of a designer to curate all relevant information in the visualisation (similarly to transformers’ duties at ISOTYPE), we can relate to these concerns. Many visualisations (aka ‘infographics’) are designed with too much emphasis on their visual beauty, compromising the veracity of data.


Another relevant question related to the use of proxies in data visualisations of abstract ideas. When one wants to visualise, for example, data about innovation, one has to find a quantifiable proxy for the abstract concept of innovation in general. Data on the use of Github might seem a good proxy here, but it also means leaving out all innovation that is not software development. Is this a fair approximation? We’re not sure. Although the panellists gave no absolute answers to the proxies question, the real value is in the question itself and in recalling it again each time we’re working on another visualisation piece.

Thank you for the food for thought FutureFest and looking forward to helping shape some of these futures to come!

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