Digital Humans: Animating Data
Screenshots from parallel systems/Territory Studios video showing the algorithmic interaction concept for the Voices of Tomorrow speculative design.
People Powered Algorithms has carried out design studies using speaking digital humans - as part of a speculative decision-making thinking tool. This is being prototyped for use in visualising refugee case data, and illustrates how close the spoken narrative comes to our own world, and yet highlights the key differences that there are between present and future states.
The fictional protagonist seen here, Samuel, is a refugee seeking resettlement, and he speaks of the ways in which his life could be different if he was helped in specific ways, and wonders how different things would be if he was able to leverage his own existing experience and skills, in ways that are not currently possible for him.
The prototyped system then suggests the locations where it envisages his resettlement could attain that desired state of affairs. The algorithmic interaction suggested by this sketch adheres to one key article of the worldbuilding approach, which is the ‘Principle of Minimal Departure’ – where an imaginary world can be minimally different from the familiar world in which we live, and is as much part of worldbuilding as is the vastly different worlds of science fiction and fantasy. The decision-making system thus has the potential to become a vehicle for the continual retelling and rescripting of our present-day overarching AI narratives as they move into the future.
Each variant of Samuel’s future, as presented by the speculative ‘augmented data analytics’ platform, is a subjunctive deconstruction of his current state, and a step toward designing a preferred state. PPA’s approach to the design of automated decision-making systems creates insight into his future life as it might appear under the influence of different data-driven scenarios, via his spoken narrative, as a lifelike ‘digital human’ – fully 3D animated avatars who effectively become ‘representatives from the future’, speaking on behalf of indicative resettlement candidates. The collaborative R&D proposes to link individual case modelling to automatically generated first-hand accounts of everyday life in different proposed resettlement locations – taking advantage of recent advances in conversational AI.
For more, see: https://voices-of-tomorrow.com/
Credits:
In an instance of case selection, the Voices of Tomorrow tool picks out Samuel, identified as having an outcome score of 45.25 if he was to be resettled in Halifax. This design imagines where technology could carry on the work of the Annie Moore algorithm produced by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the US.