Month: March 2024

This is the final week of this collaborate unit, we made some improvements in response to feedback from last week’s incubator, such as making design and layout changes to the schedule and reflecting on questions about safe regard. About the presentation, we decided to start with a short story, which we thought that would lead the audience get into the future we envisioned step by step. A map is also helpful to let people get into our community in a more immersive way.

Final conclusion of this project:

This project involved individual site visits, which we found to be successful in promoting equal engagement. Sharing experiences and reporting within the group helped us to bridge gaps.

It was valuable to be challenged by different perspectives. We found the experience to be a learning opportunity, with effective delegation based on each members’ strengths. So we all appreciated the chance to collaborate with individuals from diverse backgrounds, finding harmony in the process. 

Overall, the project provided valuable opportunities for personal development through collaboration, and we all learn something from each other.

On Monday we met at 3 o’clock before our tutorial, Juli made a visual timeline of the history and the future of community center, and we also discussed about making a schedule or timetable of the reattachment center because it shows our thinking about the in the future, what kind of physical or spiritual activities that we need. That would also help us to think about what the future will be like.

We did some research about the history of AI development, imagine what would human use AI in the future. And we also use AI to mix some of the images of our imagination of the future. That made the scenario of the future more clear and visible.

On Tuesday, we had a seminar about using AI as a labour, which made us think about weather technology has a neutral vision of human beings? As an example, the platform of Facebook starts from the very basic presupposition that every user is an individual, every user is a social atom, and this is the beginning of the realisation of individualism of the 20th century. 

There’s a book called Ghost Work shows that Workers are needed (and always will be) to produce data and value for the voracious pipelines of Al, and on the other hand to provide the maintenance of mega-machines under the form of content filtering. security checks, evaluation and non-stop optimization. It helped me understand more about the relationship between AI and the future of work.

Thursday we had the incubator of this project, each group brought their works to the LVMH Theatre, and I was really impressed by their incubator. For example, one of the group choose the volunteering work, they let us choose money or just a “thank you ”, another project which also interested me is that in the future, people don’t need to have children themselves, we only need to provide our own genes, which made me very interested in the future they envisioned because I am a person who hates children and is very afraid of childbirth. The other groups also set up interactive quizzes with the audience or presented short videos, which made me reflect on whether our group’s presentation was not engaging enough. 
During the incubator, I heard most of the people said that they loved the pictures that we made them using AI. But maybe we can make these visions more accessible or immersive? In that case maybe we can attract more people to engage in our future.

After last week, we discussed to set our future in 2080 as we researched about the community center was first emerged in the whole history. What’s more interesting is that as most of the people in our class have a chance to live until 2080, so it could be a future but no that far away from our lives.

“It is well documented that some charities, village halls in particular, are struggling to survive because of falling demand for the services they provide. Ageing rural populations, lack of interest among younger people or among new residents in commuter villages, competition from nearby towns and cities that are now easier to reach – all of these factors have been identified as problems for some rural village halls and community centres.” We used this reference as a starting point. 

Thinking about the community centre could be the function of a community not being defined by what society, economics or politics dictates but instead being a place that defines the priorities of politics, economics, society.

At the same time, we thought about when people working for the community center, community center also work for the people lives in the community.

Monday before tutorial, we had a MEETING and shared notes from the previous week when we each visited community centers, I visited three community centers, Somers Town Community Sports Center, Somers Town Community Association and Saints Pancras Community Association. The first one is near a high school so most of the people there were students. They just booked a place online then brought their own facilities and walked in, even without a receptionist, just a vending machine. The second and the third one are quite similar, a main hall with cafe, kitchen, classrooms and outdoor areas, only open on weekdays, from 10am to 5pm. Some of the activities were free, others need to pay. Most of the activities are about wellbeing, fitness and health.

Speaking of the future, we often think about the technology and AI. In this week’s reading group, I read about an article called Open AI used Kenyan workers on less toxic on the Time magazine.

The article is mainly about the workers who made ChatGPT possible offers a glimpse into the conditions in the little-known part of the AI industry, which nevertheless plays an essential role in the effort to make AI systems safe for public consumption. It reveals the precarious working conditions these workers face, and also reveals the dark side of the AI and ChatGPT, as we usually more concerned about how they facilitate our lives.

During the workshop on Wednesday, we were asked to make a list of questions about our project, we first wrote down 61 questions then try to narrow down the biggest three questions.

This is our first week of collaboration unit with MA CCC students. On February 12 I met all of our group members, Katie, Juli Basma from MA CCC, Neelabh, Manling and our tutor Georges.

During this week our group had a tutorial and two seminars, then we also did some readings to find out what we could apply to this project. But the language in the reading material is very abstract that sometimes I can’t really understand the meaning of it. 

As this project is about the future of work, so first we need to find a In our second seminar, we discussed about what kind of work place that we really want to change. After that, we selected a site visit to a community center as it can gather people from different regions or ages together, and we decided to have a visit of different community centers of our neighborhood, then compare the differences between them.

We also watched a short film about solar punk, which inspired me to imagine a future that could be technological and close to nature. As a sci-fi aesthetic genre that has only emerged in the online world in the past decade, Tumblr posts and illustrations are the initial material elements for the formation of “solarpunk”. Vegetation, lighting, ecological architecture, sustainable agriculture, handicrafts, and aircraft gradually collage the world imagination of “Solar Punk”. Compared with aesthetic concepts such as steampunk and cyberpunk that have been fully integrated with popular culture, solarpunk still presents a more loose and organic growth state.