An speculative design intervention for International Development futures.

Our Friends Electric is a design fiction project exploring alternate forms and interactions for voice AI. The project was commissioned by Michelle Thorne and Jon Rogers from Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio. The final film explores our developing relationship with voice activated AI assistants, and the future potential of these relationships through three fictional devices.

The UAE Ministry of Energy and the Prime Minister’s Office invited us to help them develop a mechanism to experience numerous possible futures around energy, and to stress test the opportunities and broader systemic consequences of each future with Cabinet Ministers and key decision makers. The ambition was that such collaborative futuring activity would help inform the country’s energy policy all the way till 2050.

This paper describes the strategies we used in our Power of 8 project — including maps, montage and storytelling — to develop concepts, visualise proposals and materialise ‘future artefacts’ during the project.

Through a series of ongoing installations, films and publications, the project aims to give a glimpse into a near-future city co-habit with ‘intelligent’ semi autonomous, networked, flying machines.

We worked with Informa, FundForum and Group Flow on a project to bring a brand new FinTech startup to market: Mūtō Labs. Mūtō Labs investigates the effect of new technologies on the future of the finance and asset management industries.

Thomas, aged 70, lives on his own after his wife died last year. His children send him smart devices to track and monitor his diet, health and sleep from a distance. But Thomas has always been fiercely independent, happy to live in an organised mess. He struggles with the order and rules imposed on him by the objects that are meant to make his life easier. In a world where ’smart objects’ will increasingly be used to provide care at a distance, how will we live with these uninvited guests? 

Blending physics and speculative design, the 5th Dimensional Camera translates Everett’s ‘Many Worlds’ theory of quantum mechanics into a tangible prototype.

Evidences from a fictional courtcase Dynamic Genetics versus Mann help imagine some of the economic and political implications of synthetic biology and gene therapy.