Microchallenge 2: Future Portals ; reflection
Dhrishya, Jorge, Sophie

I learned a lot and enjoyed working on the designing for political collaboration with AI with Jorge who has extensive knowledge on AI and design and me who has specifically extensive knowledge on design and virtual spaces and augmented spaces and Sophie who has experience in politics policymaking.

I spent most of my time in this challenge exploring different image generators and engineering different types of prompts to get the various 2D and 360 images, HDRIs, for virtual worlds that we tried to create a direct link to. So we had like a flowchart of processes from the starting point to the image that was created at the end and we spent a lot of time trying to reduce the number of arrows in the flowchart by re-engineering the prompts to skip some steps and create similar results. I spent a lot of time optimizing the process.

It was interesting to see how different AI models understood the policies and training that was given to it, especially since we had to generate responses that could generate an image and speculatively observe the future and predict in an almost accurate way.

I am fascinated by the idea of looking into the future but also the possibilities of envisioning futures that we can work towards.

This is another step to blurring the line between the digital world and the physical world with the concept of time. I have to say that I cannot possibly give something like this in the hands of the government personally because to me the government is an agent of terror and chaos that lies and manipulates and uses anything possible to control people and it aims for a type of control that I do not support or trust. This is because I am from a politically charged and unstable place where I am from in India. I am envious that here in Europe and in Barcelona, the government is an entity that people look to for help and for change, and they actually receive it and see results. It is motivating and nice to look forward to. It may be a while before I can design tools for the entity that tries to control people and not directly try to help people with my designs, but it was really interesting to think of the governing body of my project as the government, and it was mildly uncomfortable to accept it. It was really interesting to know about the experience, so I wanted to try to understand the role of the government a bit more.

To empathize with the role of the government, during another seminar I played the role of the government in a mock debate about the renovation of MACBA in Barcelona. While there are some personal values that don't align, I do empathize with the barriers in open communication and collaboration that exist in between the government and the people, and it will greatly benefit the community by letting them be a part of creating better uses for existing spaces that they already use.

I also really liked exploring the agencies of governance, control, and types of data that we would create and control, and what happens to the data generated in this process and the protection of it.

I enjoyed learning about what a speculative model is and what are the elements that can give an accurate speculative nature that rightly stands by the policies.I learned a lot about policies and training AI models. I really enjoyed figuring out the right prompt to generate realistic yet futuristic images. From this project, I hope to continue to explore the creation of virtual spaces for purposes of education and collaborative learning in design, as well as empathy building and body exploration.