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The Veldt – Ray Bradbury
This artifact is a surface formed of millions of spots. When people are on the surface, the spots can feel the people and how much stress the people put on each spot, then the shape of the surface changes to fits the body. This means that people can lie down on the surface and the surface can accurately respond to physical pressure, provide care and support to the body and redouble its comfort. Nowadays, there are a lot of designs that follows the human body mechanics principle design, but this artifact will take this to a whole new level. The surface will be designed for anyone, as long as the person give pressure to the surface, it fits into the body. But the problem is, if the surface has no limit and can adjust to all pressure no matter how high it is, then if someone gives too much pressure, he or she can be swallowed by the surface and can never get out. Also, what if someone jump on the surface, if the person jumps hard enough, there will be a whole on the surface according to the design principle of it, and that can be dangerous.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – Ursula K. Le Guin
This artifact is a big ball with thorns all over it. The ball is about 2 meters in diameter and the thorns are 1 meters long, which means this ball is much larger and taller than people. There are sensors on the end of each thorns, and when people get close enough to the thorns, the sensors detect them and have reaction to it, the thorns will draw back to avoid being touched. When people’s hand move all over the ball, different thorns will draw back in different degrees and it looks like a flow. I think there are some existing technologies related to this but I don’t know a lot about it. The existence of this invention might hurt people and people may use it in a wrong way.
The Plaque by Yan Leisheng:
This artifact is made up of two individual clocks. One clock operates in the normal way, with universal time. The other clock has a sensor in it and can detect the movement of people standing in front of the clock, then it changes the rotation speed of the pointer in exact proportion to the speed of the movement of people comparing to the average speed of normal people’s movement. People barely notice the passing by of time in their daily lives, and when slowing down or speeding up their gestures in front of the clock, they can feel the existence of time and how we live with it. My artifact uses nothing high-tech, but recognizing the gesture and calculating the speed of it might need a lot of data and a complicated program, but other than that, it’s very practical. I think the existence of this invention might cause uncertainty of time, people will start to think about how to define time and why the universal time uses minute, hour, etc as units instead of other units.
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