Intro
"Designing Humane Tech" is all about the study of emerging technology in todays world and how it will shape society and individuals in the future. More importantly, how we as students can find ways to design technology in the most innovative and creative ways without harming the ecosystem and individuals. Analyzing the effects of new tech and creating design solutions on how to better influence our bodies, communities and ecosystem.
Issues Within the Smartphone and Social Media
There are many problems with the design of smartphones nowadays which can lead to addiction, over usage, laziness etc. Most social media applications today are designed to keep the user scrolling or coming back constantly, and can cause widespread “FOMO” intentionally. "FOMO" can be described as the "fear of missing out", or anxiety that comes from the feeling of not being included in something fun or interesting (usually derived from social media). One example of this is the algorithms or apps like tiktok, youtube, instagram and several others. These design features can be very detrimental, especially to the youth due to the constant dopamine release when using these applications. Major problems emerge with these designs such as sleep quality, depression, distraction, and countless other issues.
Design Practices For Bodies
Mental Health
One possible design to combat these problems for smartphones can be a design feature in smartphones which analyzes the unhealthy amounts of usage on your phone. While this is already a thing, this design implementation can have a built-in planner which is required to fill out, and allows you to plan what you need to do each day ensuring that things get done by giving restrictions on your phone usage. It can also analyze unhealthy amounts of scrolling or time spent on social media, or spending time watching pointless videos which waste time, and get in the way of things we need to accomplish. In hopes of becoming more productive and less addicted to our devices, a design like this would attempt to make the user realize how this overuse affects their daily life and how this time can be better spent. “A 2016 study of more than 450 teens found that greater social media use, nighttime social media use and emotional investment in social media — such as feeling upset when prevented from logging on — were each linked with worse sleep quality and higher levels of anxiety and depression.” This is a widespread problem of this generation, and these problems need to be dealt with instead of neglected.
Design For Culture
Artificial Intelligence
Some problems with AI include some of the algorithms and ways that AI bots can learn and gather information over time. The more technology advances, in most cases, the less work we have to do as humans. One of the problems with this is that students can take advantage of these programs in order to have AI do their work for them, resulting in a lack of learning abilities. One example of this is a new chat bot recently gained popularity, called ChatGPT. This is a chat bot that you can ask anything, and it writes out a detailed answer for you based on all the research it has learned over time. This can be an issue for many teachers, as students can write the questions for their homework and have the bot answer it for them instantly. One thing that teachers can do to counter this could be simply learning all materials in class, and making sure students understand and are engaged. Doing this will limit the amount of work students bring home, so that they cannot get their answers from the chat bot. This also ensures that the students are in fact learning.
“With a tool like this at their fingertips, it could muddy the waters when evaluating a student's actual writing capabilities because you're giving kids potentially a tool where they could misrepresent their understanding of a prompt,” says Whitney Shashou, founder and advisor at educational consultancy Admit NY.
Design For earth
E-Waste/Pollution
Electronics that are brought into developing nations pollute towns and villages and pose major environmental and health dangers. Workers on these wastelands pose a great risk to various respiratory diseases and lung cancer as well due to the pollution of E-waste. These workers collect parts such as wire and burn them to extract the copper inside, to then sell to make a profit. Burning these parts is very harmful for the environment in these countries, as the harmful toxins enter the air, posing a health risk to citizens in the area. Most of the workers in these wastelands are children as young as 5 years old. These children inhale these toxins daily, which is harmful for their health and causing them to not grow like a normal child would. This polluted air can also reach surrounding towns, and since food in these different countries is sold on the streets, the poisonous chemicals in the air can contaminate the food for all citizens living there. These illegal loads of E- waste enters the countries in Africa because countries like Australia, whose government says that they simply do not have the money to properly discard the waste, have no other option but to send it to countries like Ghana. These countries have no right to be sending their waste to countries in Africa, and the export of E-waste must stop as it is a big problem in these developed countries.
Cleaning Up the Worlds Fastest Growing Trash Problem
Credits: http://jolineblais.net/nmd200/schedule-2022/
Credits:
Created with images by vegefox.com - "tech" • sdecoret - "Businessman using tech devices and icons thin line interface"