Lab made meat is meat developed from animal cell culture. Many people express concerns that lab made meat could have high production costs, unforeseen health risks, and have an economic impact on agricultural labor. However, from research there are many positives such as it could have competitive pricing against standard meat, provide the groundwork for advancements in other lab made foods, and cut green house gas emissions. Personally, I would try lab made meat once to try it but I would not rely on it as a main source of food. The concept is still very alarming to me but it’s a good alternative for those that want to customize the texture or fat percentages of their food.

 

Some of the most important ethical responsibilities of interaction designers to their end users is transparency and consent. Many companies have felt the legal effects from using dark patterns in their designs, tricking the user into making decisions they are not comfortable or aware of. One recent example can be seen in the high stakes Facebook’s Data Privacy Concerns lawsuit, where Facebook was deceptive and not transparent when using user’s data in an unethical manner for political incentives. When it comes to using AI in the integration of our work, we’ve seen many social media platforms use AI generated algorithms for their own monetized gain at the expense of users becoming more addicted, subjection to widespread AI generated fraud, and presenting AI generated biases that can be harmful to many groups. Keeping transparency and consistently requesting user consent at the forefront of the design process is key to avoid unethical misfortunes but also create a sound, beneficial relationship with users.

The responsibility of Interaction Designers is to implement principles of resonant design in order to make what they design available to everyone. Resonant design is a concept that was discussed in my upper division studio this semester. It is an approach that blurs the lines between disability and ability, appealing to both groups to embody mainstream design demand. It resonates for people with limitations and for people without limitations. Resonant design is a good alternative proposal to universal design. In contrast, universal design caters to making an environment accessible, usable, and beneficial for everyone. From what I’ve learned, resonant design practices are more inclusive and as interaction designers, our whole field is centered around the pains, wants, needs, opportunities, and backgrounds of our users to create more memorable and comprehensive experiences. There’s many approaches that can be made when designing for a variety of users. We need to constantly refine every touchpoint within the system to adapt to constantly changing abilities and capabilities of our users. As Rochelle King, the VP of Product Discovery at Netflix once said, design is never finished and should be constantly dissected and improved to include everyone.

Our relationship with technology was altered on the release of the first iPhone. Removing the buttons and need for a stylus pushed forward the idea of only implementing multi touch touch screens and minimal physical buttons on future smartphone designs. The days of extensive mini keyboards and general physicality elements on a smart phone were gone and in order to have a chance at competing with Apple, companies needed to follow in their footsteps. Although IBM released a touchscreen phone in 1992, named Simon, using finger touch on the screen was very ineffective compared to using the stylus. Additionally, it wasn’t mainstream or as successful as Apple’s launch. 

 

Personally, I wasn’t old enough to remember the release of the iPhone “2G” or first iPhone, I remember my dad, a diehard Android user buying the succeeding iPhone 3G which had similar capabilities at a more budget friendly price. The first models of the iPhone were an out there concept especially during a time when most people still had flip phones and blackberries. Or really, some people I knew didn’t have a phone at all because their usefulness was not reasonable. Not many people could justify purchasing such an expensive device especially for non work related purposes.

 

The introduction of touchscreen devices affected interaction design in a way that shifted users’ mindset towards phones. Suddenly, users were empowered to customize their phone in greater ways using gestures that they were already accustomed to, in everyday activities, like tapping, swiping, pinching, and dragging. Humans have emotional connections when using their hands. That’s why many people speak with their hands, eat, and make signals. The same deeper mind and body connection happens when we grace our fingertips across a screen surface and interact with technology to where some people feel as though they can’t go without it. It has become a part of our everyday lives as a sterile externally mechanical object has now become a minimal “blank canvas” to customize internally.

In the Behind the Hype of Generative AI lecture, Serife Wong, a Turkish-Hawaiian artist and AI research fellow focused on the ethics and biases of generative ai. She believes that the hype surrounding AI is problematic and an unfounded marketing term for major companies to gain investors. Dismantling the name, she asserted that AI is not artificial because of the hidden labor and exploitation of overseas data center laborers and others around the world. It’s not intelligent because of how much human input is needed for it to run effectively.

 

The hidden labor behind AI is run by exploited workers in impoverished nations. They work for as little as $1.46/hr, performing repetitive tasks, in harmful working conditions. The famous New York Magazine headline puts it simply, “How many humans does it take to make tech seem human? Millions.” Who employs these people? Wong asked. Open AI and the U.S. military are the most notable customers. These companies push for AI to be a part of everyone’s lives to make it simpler and efficient while making other people’s lives exhausting and difficult. It was hard to hear how overhyped, unrealistic, and exaggerated AI model capabilities are versus how they are presented in media events. Wong expressed how disinformation, harmful content, economic impacts, cybersecurity, and privacy are the most prevalent concerns when using these models. 

 

One of the sections spoke on the impact tech had on the Te Hiku Media Organization. It was personally my favorite part, although it was briefly mentioned. Te Hiku Media is a Māori radio station and media services collective that is trying to preserve their living language and transmit it inter-generationally. Meanwhile, Big Tech corporations are actively still trying to reserve the rights and steal their language from under them. Te Hiku helped record over 300 hours of audio in their mother tongue from speakers across New Zealand. From this, they were able to build indigenous speech recognition tech using Mozilla’s Deep Speech tool. Even though they were persuaded to sell their data, they resisted and insisted that the only people who were going to profit from the Māori language were going to be the Māori people. After years of withstanding bribing from large companies they successfully launched their own language app to help users decolonize the sound of their language and push for the native sound to return for future generations. 

 

This section and the lecture as a whole helped the audience gain some insight on a rather confusing and disputed topic. While many push the stance that AI will be able to replace many workers in the future, the narrative sometimes doesn’t match the current reality. Companies will overhype the utility of AI models but the public has put forward their concerns and challenged the position of how much they want AI to influence their life.

In the past, web design could be described as static with a fragile structure and difficult user experience. User experience developed off of web design in an attempt to create more meaningful, charming, and user-centered experiences. The two have since overlapped and became intertwined. Web design is primarily concerned with web based products while UX encompasses functionality, user research, tangible objects, physical experiences that are enhanced with technology, etc. The transition from web design to UX came about from questioning the ethical design of digital products and company practices. While Don Norman played a part by coining the term UX, I don’t think there’s a specific turning point in time that can be deemed the “start of user experience design”. Rather it was a collective effort to create a field for reflection of consumer opinions, build company reputation (ROI), and design premium products.

Graphical user interface has significantly improved since the early Macintosh/Windows days. When the Macintosh was introduced Chrys Goyens, a journalist, called it “icon-mania” criticizing the use of icons for folders, trash cans, and color palettes. Similarly, Marcia Peoples Halio, an English professor at the University of Delaware argued that Macintosh’s GUI was confusing and caused her students to produce poor work. Steve Jobs fought back against critics and insisted on implementing design that mimicked real world objects to put users at ease. Jobs argued that the Macintosh was catered to be a non complex system, that was visually oriented rather than word oriented, with click driven GUI instead of keyboard-driven commands.  He commented to the Macintosh team that they would “put a dent in the universe,” expressing how innovative it would be. The Macintosh’s GUI was groundbreaking and disrupted the personal computing space and although Jobs traded off utility, by slowing down most functions, it had beautiful graphics for the time.

 

In contrast, Microsoft’s Windows 1.0 was lackluster in comparison and copied some of Macintosh’s GUI with some internal differences. With Windows 2.0 users could minimize, maximize, resize, and overlap windows.With Susan Kare’s contributions for Windows 3.0 she brought a unified style to the GUI, reflecting upon her design principles of meaning, memorability, and clarity. Many of her designs for Windows remained unchanged until Windows XP.

What needs to be approved now that technology is advancing is expanding customization and touchless-gestural interactions. After the pandemic, the future of touchless GUI has exploded from Whole Foods One Checkout hand payment, the NUI mirror concept from the Black Mirror series, and BMW 7 series gesture control. I’m excited to see the expansion of touchless GUI as the world becomes more attune to alternative ways of communicating and interacting.

 

When it comes to who should be responsible for inventing new technologies, there should be a balance between governments, corporations, and open source ventures. Corporations and the government have been the biggest producers of new technologies. Through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US government has helped create the internet, AI speech recognition and signal processing, hypertext, and stealth aircraft technologies. DARPA, which consists of six technical offices, isn’t subject to the same restrictions or financial limitations as other agencies so their scientists and engineers have been known to develop high quality products. In recent years, more of their ventures have been contracted out to corporations. However, the government’s involvement and contributions cannot be denied, they dominate multiple industries, most notably defense computing and warfare devices. 

Historically, the government has controlled and regulated corporations, yet 56% of Americans think major technology companies should be regulated more. The push back from the public and government agencies against corporations is due to consumer privacy laws being violated more frequently in recent years. Additionally, corporations have become more incentivized to bring in record breaking profits, putting business before innovation, resulting in court cases and public outcry. The government, corporations, and open source ventures should reflect on their profound effect on users’ habits and regulations should continue to meditate on emerging problems.

Xerox Star changed the direction of computing by connecting personal workstations to a local network in order to attach shared resources. With the introduction of the “desktop metaphor” they were able to make icons on the Star desktop resemble everyday physical objects that can be found around an office. This way, users are more familiar with digital concepts like folders, documents, in and out baskets, etc because these articles would normally be held on their real life desk “top.”  

Xerox Star developers assumed that office professionals would only occasionally use the system, rather than people who spent most of their time at the machine. There’s some irony in their assumptions as the work life balance has evolved throughout the years and switched to primarily digital work. Of course the Star can be credited as one of the most successful inventions to come out of the Xerox PARC research group. It heavily influenced the work of Apple and Microsoft who capitalized on their GUI and mouse advancements.