Month: March 2024

This week, the layer focuses more on presentation and communication.

For this week’s lecture, Mark’s artistic intervention really impressed me. He let another people to live with a camera to record all the details of one’s life, and he used a VR device to simulate another person’s life and try to understand a new lifestyle. It is crazy but brave and creative. His background of fine art really influenced a lot with his style of intervention. This inspired me to think about my future intervention, do I have a chance, more likely do I have the guts, to do an artistic intervention using performance art.

For this week’s project, we spent a lot of time to prepare for the slide. During the process of making a slide, we dug deeper by asking ourselves the questions that might be asked. It is not as simple as copy paste, for example, we found that the job type for job key is not sufficient enough, we researched the work type and made it more detailed. For another example, when I create the slide of collaboration, we want to cover more aspects using SWOT analysis. When I wrote down key points, I thought a lot, took a time to look back, the appreciation for teamwork and tolerance from both sides came naturally into my mind and it leads to a more positive mind towards my future collaboration. And we also added critical lens to our slide, we did not see our project as 100% perfect, such as the solution of universal basic income is controversial, my Chinese teammate shared me a podcast which analyzed the pros and cons of UBI (and I attached the detail below), it is said that there was an investigation, the people who got the money and then refuse to work and take drugs were actually very few, normal and rational people will feel that they will be focusing more to a long-term gain, if the money is spent in the short term, then the risk is higher. But all in all, UBI is still a very controversial topic. 

Beyond that, from our persentation, I learned so many things, but one thing I especially want to mention is that we should always consider diversity when creating archetypes.

This week begins with another conflict during tutorial. Since I am more experienced with dealing with conflict, this week I stayed calm, when facing conflict, my tear did not drop unconsciously, that is a very huge step for me both mentally and especially physically, that way I can look more stable and calmer to state myself when an extreme situation happen. In the future when I am at a work scenario, I can look more professional. And I had a long conversation with another teammates on Wednesday, we all enjoyed it, during the conversation, we understand each other better and embrace the difference between each other. The conflict in collaboration unit definitely is a hidden treasure and a valuable lesson. A happy ending. Yay!

This week, we extended our speculation and added the layer of speculative scenario, world building and tested with incubator. This week’s blog contains weekly lecture theme, the content of our project and my reflection of collaboration.

For this week’s lecture, we focused on complex systems – human and non-human agents. In Lee’s class, I created art using random material and asked to explain my own expression of future of work. In Eilliot’s class, I had a further understanding of technology using the linking object I brought, which is my oyster card.

For the content of our project, our team created our own definition, framework and structure of work, that leads to the idea of the Ministry of Human Resources of UK government, and using job key to document a person’s primary, secondary and tertiary job so that it can make invisible job more visible. After communicating with diverse audience, the problem is some people will be unwilling to be documented because of various reasons such as visa / main job requires people not have part-time job, and questions are put forward towards how we evaluate one’s working time, how can we make amend to those who are not getting paid by their invisible work. 

By build our speculative world, I think the conditions that can make the world we built exist is that we have to be powerful enough so we can carry out the job key system, so that people can be forced to follow it. (Personally speaking, I want to avoid using power to supervise or force people) And another problem is how we can make amends to workers, to stretch this problem into the future, our team wants to use universal basic income. 

And last but not least, for collaboration, we had another conflict on the work allocation of the project content and the tension came from preventing anyone from taking the credit. Even though the conversation is extremely hard, I can understand it and look it in a positive way. I reached out to the unstable teammate and expressed how I care about her feeling. I am more experienced to deal with conflict and able to see things in a different way and try to understand from the other side of the conflict. I am really glad I can be capable of a more mature approach when facing intense situation. And I can also understand the frustration from people on the other side.

I look at Unit 2 in a positive way, it opens a door for a more cruel but real aspect of the world. And I can think more, prepare more courage to become a global citizen, this experience is like a vaccine, if I occur things like that in the future (and I wish not), I can be more experienced to deal with it and take care of myself.