ContraVision Study

Video: ContraVision Study - Utopia

Transcript: ContraVision Study Video - Utopia

Transcript

Fictional person: I am a manufacturing worker, I work in the small town of eastwood at the local community factory.

Fictional person: I think making manufacturing more digital local and sustainable has been good for us all.

Fictional person: I have to wear sensors that work. My work watch monitors my heart rate and how engaged i am in the task at hand. There are also sensors inside my cap and my vr which monitor my brain they let my manager know if i've been on a job for too long or a desk for too long and it manages to shift so well we all get a fair amount of exercise and rest.

Fictional person: I've lost a bunch of weight and feel healthier since they introduced it. I wear the watch when i'm at home it helps me get enough sleep. We can even buddy up with a colleague to help each other stick to our individual wellness program.

Fictional person: Paul Dixon and i are currently leading in our department. I have my own projects, i'm designing a new hydroponic garden system with some friends i made in vr design rooms. I use my manufacturing experience and pair it with engineers and meta material experts. We're an international team and all speak different languages.

Fictional person: The vr rooms translate for us and we can all see and touch our designs before they're made. We all wear body sensors and that data is visible to the rest of the team, it provides context to our communication. I've got access to engineers and design experts that all work from home making digital models that i can download and print.

Fictional person: It feels good to be able to collaborate with people across the world it's empowering us all to develop our communities. When i'm working with my robot i call him bob he's able to sense when i'm losing concentration but also when we're working well. He's able to anticipate my movements and we work together as one. The data that's captured from the sensors while our work is used to design future tasks.

Fictional person: The other day i was working with the robot on a new assembly process and the system was noticing that i was getting quite tired so this job is now limited to 20 minutes at a time. To be honest when they brought the robots in i thought there wouldn't be a place for me. I'm not a programmer but i found that i'm physically problem-solving with my mechanical body and it becomes second nature after a while. Because our robots are situationally intelligent they can bring a craftsmanship to larger and more dangerous processes making the best of my skills and talent while keeping me safe and producing a better product.

Utopia:

This video was developed as a provocation used in a study exploring public perceptions towards potential future digital manufacturing technologies. The study was based on the ContraVision Technique, which poses extreme, alternative viewpoints on an envisioned product or service, via a series of fictional narratives, or “provocations.” In this case, this film provides a fictional perspective of a “Utopian” vision of digital manufacturing, where technology is harnessed for the good of society and workers interact effectively and productively with it. In the ContraVision technique, the “Utopian” vision is contrasted with a corresponding “Dystopian” vision; presenting alternative viewpoints on futuristic topics in this way can stimulate discussion in interviews, focus groups, and/or questionnaires with viewers, and this can encourage a wider range of feedback than by just presenting a single viewpoint.

Credits: Dr Richard Ramchurn and AlbinoMosquito Productions

http://doi.org/10.17639/nott.7176

Video: ContraVision Study - Dystopia

Transcript: ContraVision Study Video - Dystopia

Transcript

[Music]

Fictional person: I'm a manufacturing worker i work for a multinational called eastwood which has been buying up the factories around here. It's a bit frowned upon to talk to people outside the company so i might get into trouble for this but it's good to talk to someone about my work.

[Music]

Fictional person: In order to keep the workforce as productive as possible we all wear a few body sensors that read how much we're concentrating, how physically active we are and our general level of fitness. If the system notices my mind is wondering there's a speaker built into the robot that speaks out loud telling me to pay more attention to the task. We all get a score that takes into account all types of metrics this score is also affected by how much we speak to each other about non-task-related things we aren't really allowed to speak to other workers much there are certain people on the line like paul dixon for example. We've noticed that no one is able to speak with him for more than a few seconds before the system moves him on.

Fictional person: We're told that the physiological data that yeast would collect from our body senses is not sold or shared but it's not useful to anyone else and we can't be identified by that data. I noticed in the shop yesterday when i was buying a bottle of wine for the family meal that a message flashed up that i would have to watch an unskippable drink aware max production video on the company fitness app if i continue, I just click ok. We have a new process the robot and i are having trouble collaborating on. I think it learned with someone much smaller than me. Basically it's trying to weld before i put a certain component in which makes it really awkward to reach. It ends up taking more time and it's killing my score.

Fictional person: We not only compete against each other in the factory but against all the other operators doing the same job as me across the world. You know i developed a technique that shaved minutes off my unit production. The next week i saw that it was implemented as standard practice across the company, i didn't get any credit for it.

[Music]

Fictional person:The robots record the physical movements of their partners and others and can use it to train workers. It's able to tell them if they're going too slow and give hints as to the most efficient movements. It's the worst trying to break in a new robot, usually they've been trained by scientists that don't understand the best way of doing things and the robot keeps telling you keep your love done and since there's no real possibility of my older colleagues re-skilling a lot of them are freelancing in greenland and the ones that stayed there on a basic income. All they can afford are the basic lines made by the budget robots. I had to take my daughter to the hospital for tests but was denied the time off so i snipped out a half hour of my best data and fed the movements on repeating to one of the robots. In the back I took the sensors off me and put them on the robot, the system thought i was working, i got perfect marks for that day and popped in to sign off when i was done.

Dystopia:

This video was developed as a provocation used in a study exploring public perceptions towards potential future digital manufacturing technologies. The study was based on the ContraVision Technique, which poses extreme, alternative viewpoints on an envisioned product or service, via a series of fictional narratives, or “provocations.” In this case, this film provides a fictional perspective of a “Dystopian” vision of digital manufacturing, where technology is used to control the workforce and leads to invasions of personal privacy. In the ContraVision technique, the “Dystopian” vision is contrasted with a corresponding “Utopian” vision; presenting alternative viewpoints on futuristic topics in this way can stimulate discussion in interviews, focus groups, and/or questionnaires with viewers, and this can encourage a wider range of feedback than by just presenting a single viewpoint.