Who tells you what to cook for dinner?
Who tells you what to get your sister for the holidays?
Who tells you what to buy on Instagram?
Who tells you what jobs to apply for?
Who tells you how to vote, and what to believe?
It’s frightening. We are beginning to resemble blocks of code — tagged, categorized and archived for the purpose of enriching companies, electing politicians, and maintaining the status quo, or normalization — pushing everyone towards the identical degree of sameness.
Software as it is designed rules our lives. It is integrated into our daily experience in ways that are profound and a little bit concerning. …
by Zhenzhen Qi & Yang Wang
As technologists and artists in new media (that strange place where words, imagery, meaning and new tech collide), we design, build, and test software experiences and products that center the deep creative impulse of humanity, because we are interested in the power of that impulse.
We’ve observed throughout our work that many computing and AI software and tools have underestimated, and even excluded, this human impulse from their design.
The particular joy of uncovering patterns and logic embedded in various functions of the universe, and building things that make use of them for people to enjoy, is unparalleled. It’s no surprise that as computing devices became more accessible and explainable, people fell in love with them. But today, many are becoming uncomfortable with their ubiquity and feel less understood and more constrained by computing and AI, and that they must fight or compete with the software and products sold to them. …
About
