Speculative Design, UX UI Design

Future UX Design Practice, “Non UI Mycelial Technology Practice”

Brief

To create a speculative storytelling deliverable to situate a ‘future practice’ , informed by extensive primary and secondary research. Looking into trends within the UX industry and exploring ourselves as a practitioner and as an individual, how we could challenge the status quo and influence the future in which our practice plays a transformative role.

Secondary Hindsights Research

I started my research by taking trends identified from an article from The UX Collective - “Enter Late-Stage-UX" ;”Commodization, Financialization, Disintegration and Automation”. I then found sources to back up those claims from literature I had recently read or was currently reading and categorised them into Drivers and Signals, as well as mapping the spread, contagion, strength and maturity of such. The most key sources within this were four books ; ‘Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need’,‘Radical Technologies : the design of everyday life’, ‘The Best Interface is No Interface’, and ‘Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed’ .

UX Trends Mapping

A key Driver behind “Commodization”, “Financialization” and “Disintegration” I found was Addiction UX (in context to attention economy). I decided to explore these ideas further within my primary research.

Primary Insights Research

To define further how I could think about Addiction UX and attention economy in relation to a speculative future practice, I attended various talks discussing the future of UX , emergent technologies and trends around creative industries - the first being by PITCH STUDIOS at the OPN FESTIVAL. I was especially interested in a slide which described “Re-wilding the internet” as “Shared Knowledge architectures, the ‘Cozy Web’ re-imagination". If divesting from platform capitalist social media and online spaces is IN, I want to integrate into my work. Internet based interfaces have not been “designed” with the intention of serving the user, but rather to do whatever possible to keep more of us “logged in and wired” constantly.Therefore, we should choose to imagine a web, and aim towards designing one in which users are intent-fully interacting with it.

PITCH STUDIOS , OPN FESTIVAL

MAGGIE APPLETON, UX BRIGHTON

Foresights

Based on these research findings , I concluded that whilst there are major issues around profit incentive informing problematic designs within digital interactive spaces, there isn’t necessarily a need to be totally dystopian about how we view emergent technologies such as AI, as UX designers even within major tech companies are still critical of how these technologies are utilised (to an extent) . The figureheads of “Big Tech” or techno-solutionist products do not necessarily represent everyone working with emergent technologies or within “tech”. The issue itself of problematic internet user interfaces seems to stem from wider ideologies of society, such as white supremacy and logistical capitalist mindsets. "larger systems— ­including norms, values, and assumptions are encoded in and reproduced through the design of sociotechnical systems, or in political theorist Langdon Winner’s famous words, how “artifacts have politics.”

Ellen Ullman describes how the ideology of right wing libertarianism is embedded within the premise and advertisement of the personal computer

Scenario Building

To counteract these larger norms and values within society , I decided to base my speculative scenario and practice around a focus on alternative ways of organising people and infrastructure within digital spaces. To inform this I looked at Fungi, Mycelial networks as a metaphor :

“Roots and fungi combine to form what is called a mycorrhiza: itself a growing-together of the Greek words for fungus (mykós) and root (riza). In this way, individual plants are joined to one another by an underground hyphal network: a dazzlingly complex and collaborative structure that has become known as the Wood Wide Web.”

“For centuries, fungi were widely held to be harmful to plants, parasites that cause disease and dysfunction. More recently, it has become understood that certain kinds of common fungi exist in subtle symbiosis with plants, bringing about not infection but connection. ”

What if , instead of engaging with “bogus digital friendship peddling corporations” like that of Meta , that encourage the commodification of the self and cause “the warping of out social relations by data exploitation , with dire consequences for our bodies, our lands, our minds and our democracy” , we instead created online networks of mutual aid, utilising mycelial intelligence as a medium for technological bio-mimicry. We could inhabit digital spaces of subtle symbioses.

Speculative Scenario

It is the year 2034. The internet as we know it has become oversaturated with “AI slop” content, generative AI hallucinations. “AI models are trained on generated content , ideas lose provenance and truth loses contact with reality and degrades even more”. In response to this , some people have become extremely discerning and cautious of content found on the “raw web” , as people once did when navigating the deep or dark web, and seek answers from real academics/experts.    Others have become much more anti intellectual than before, valuing only immediately applicable knowledge to their respective work practices. “If correct or useful information is so difficult to come by online, why bother seeking outside the context of my personal advantages?”

Teams of designers have developed biomimicry practice technologies, replicating the subtle symbiotic relations of Mycelial Fungi.  These technologies allow users to anticipate the needs of others and distribute appropriate knowledge and other resources to those in need .  This is executed through “filtered web” personalised AI models allow people to “instinctively” find others for various purposes and communicate essentially telepathically, ”syncing their brains like a neural network”.

A “non UI” mycelial technology, which has all the benefits of cozy web spaces without leaving people in the dark forest to “get eaten”

My Speculative UX Practice

“Mercurial Data aims to create meaningful and impactful experiences within or towards others. To understand how technology and society intersect with design and produce experiences often through situationist knowledge. Valuing the desires and needs of real people over profit incentive or any other platform capitalist driven standard.

We facilitate, design and build the structure of digital peer to peer networks , to ensure that sectors of human life are not commodified through extraction of personal data into centralised platform capitalist networks. Instead , people can exchange data in a decentralised manner for those they think could benefit from their knowledge, experiences or resources.”

Speculative Portfolio

My speculative Portfolio is an Virtual Space, inspired by 3D RPG Games . It is a conversational dialogue interface and piece of storytelling . The user is taken through projects in a linear historical timeline. An “ANTI RPG RPG” , the user navigates a linear storyline, with little input themselves that significantly impacts the result of the storytelling. I control how my work is presented but the interface itself feels more like a game . Narrative telling that engages the user through emotive language, direct address. This engages them with the brand voice , conceptual and political aims of my projects (such as cyber-feminist related topics).

Speculative Projects

We take this concept of mutual aid within online spaces and extend it to people instinctively receiving empathic signals to their mind when those in their “mutual experience network” are experiencing health issues. Mimicking that of the Mechanotransduction of spiders nervous system , their relationships to their webs . We instinctively “feel” in our bodies when someone of similar experience to us in in need of our situationist knowledge of socially unaddressed topics , of which lack of knowledge on one’s health issues is causing great pain. These cues are received through wearable technologies that trigger the nervous system.

Inspired by the resourcefulness and passion of millennial fan blog tumblr, individuals in their teens self teaching themselves “HTML and Javascript just to make smut blogs” or “Harry Potter fan accounts” , this online network allows users to build spaces to their own liking and preferences relating to cozy web interest based “areas” . Users mutually world build online communities through “improv storytelling ” cues which are created live generatively. These spaces operate in a variety of interfaces depending on the interests of the community, from simple stack formatted social media to virtual 3d spaces. Through working together to create spaces related to mutual interests, users get to know those in their community through how they experiment and create new features for the interface/social online space itself.

When existing in academic settings like medical school, university etc , users instinctively can "intuit" those with their research interests in physical environments through XR, as well as intuiting their values in mind. This allows users to share information willingly, knowing they can trust those they are interacting with. Additionally they can send money and resources to projects they truly care about through interfaces discreetly. People of marginalised groups can feel kinship and have discussion on topics they are passionate about , in physical setting where they may not always feel safe to publicly express themselves. This is executed through wearable XR technologies that allow the user to view map interfaces, augmented reality chat and search clickthroughs to find people they feel safe with.