Hauntology

Today we have a very interesting workshop about Hauntology. Basically what it's saying its that for whatever technology, if we cannot reverse engineering the components and have full understanding of how it works, it can be considered as magic.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

                                                                                    -Arthur C. Clarke 

                       

As technology is so far advanced today and super efficient, almost none has the abilities to tell each every technology's working principles. So this is not about a classic ghost story, its about understanding a technology and been able to understand what does it actually relying on to make it work. 

Today, when we are introduced to a new product, we know its functionality and we know how it's supposed to be used, we naturally accepted and convinced the true that we do no need to know its working principle to operate it. which could lead to some consequences we could not foreseen. i.e a prank done by the internet claiming that iOS update will waterproof the iphone. 

Which may seen stupid prank that none would ever fall into yet we are wrong, there are a lot more people actually believe in the claim and ultimately broke their phone due to lack of understanding the differences between software and hardware. As Clarke would suggest, they did not distinguish the technology and magic.

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The theory behind this is actually very inspirational. As the technology is not something easily understandable, most of us will only see it as magic. And here is the problem, we all know that robotic and smart object are the trend of modern technology. As people has no knowledge on them, how would they be able to tell if something is misbehaved or being hacked/controlled by someone else? Or went out of their own way to use the object it was never intended to be used?

Here I'm not suggesting that we should educate the public to know every detail in electronic devices, but at least we as designer could speculate the potential problems the society might be encountered in the future. That is my understanding of the subject.

Later on we were given an exercise. We were to break down an existing object to its user, uses, origin, mechanism, context, aesthetics, shape, appearance, materials. As we broke down into those categories, we break it down even further, asking more questions...

"Why the door doesn't close?"   "Because it`s broken."

"Why is it broken?"    "Because the hinges buckled."

"Why are the hinges bucked?"    "Because someone ran a trolley into it."

....

....

....etc.

Basically just to decompose the object to the absolute basic level, then from that point we will imagine a new type of object from the most basic level-to speculate( base on known criteria and it's functions to predict the future) a new object.

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