For this group project, we are following the speculative design framework, the responsible agenda, and the design goal of performance. The problem we identified was the overworking problem that is getting more and more common in major Chinese companies. This problem has recently attracted much attention recently in China with a campaign called “996.ICU”. “996” stands for starting to work from 9 am to 9 pm, and for 6 days.
We speculated that in about 10 years, the situation will get worse and worse such that the overall working quality and people’s health. Therefore, the government decides to intervene and therefore we are designing a product for them. The solution we designed for this is an office management system called the “SmartOffice”. This “SmartOffice” system keeps track of a worker’s stress level and concentration level. If these levels exceed a certain value, the workers can go home. And if the levels are continuously high, the company will get fined.
For me, speculative design it quite tricky. It is very hard to speculate a situation and design a product that fits in reasonably. According to the feedback we get, it was true that something about our project is quite controversial. First, the lights are visible to everyone in the office, which leads to a potential of discrimination. Second, since the project is based on supervision and surveillance, will lead to risks of compromising people’s privacy. However, later I realize that this is was speculative design is meant to be. To speculate a situation and possible outcomes and reflect on them critically. To this end, I think the project was quite successful. Personally, I think that our project touches on the debate of whether we should rely on the machines or human to ensure fairness. I think this will always be a controversial topic since at least today, machines are not fair at all, they always make absolute decisions without considering specific circumstances. However, people could be worse, since we are controlled by our personal interest, desire, and personal values or stereotypes, which make us even less reliable.