The research topic that interests me the most is the week 1 lecture which is the ‘How and Why We Future’. I’m interested in this topic because I can understand more about how important it is for us to really think about the things that will happen in the future, mostly on how we manage to overcome unpleasant events that are unpleasant. The questions I have been considering are why is it important to think about the future? Why should designers ‘future’ now? And what do you imagine about the future? These questions really made me think hard and really consider this question seriously. 

             Why is it important to think about the future, it is because everything in the future is related to the present, and by us taking consideration about the future we could imagine the future we want and we could also make it happen and also anticipate changes. Futuring could be the solution for that, we could use suturing as a method to imagine or think about the future. Why should designers ‘future’ now? Designers should plan for the upcoming events, everything around us is designed, so if designers future now they could prevent anything bad from happening and also to come up with better solutions. Becoming a designer means that we’re not only thinking just of the object we design, but we also have to consider the system or the surrounding us that will participate. For the futuring method could work smoothly, we need to imagine about the future first and for me I imagine the future being collaborative, everyone come together to help each other, and also future with a much greater technology to facilitate peoples to help each other out without worrying about the difference towards each other and after we consider about the future we like, from there we could anticipate unpleasant event and built a strategy. 

              Be able to carry out the future more seriously, we must have a strong and reliable strategy, besides that we must also have strong intentions so that the strategy is successful. For us to be able vision the future we need every individuals to actively participate on it, as Oomen, Hoffman, and Hajer (2021) noted, “Individuals and collective actors (businesses, governments, NGOSs) ‘anticipate’ futures, Societies develop and adopt tools and social technologies to render the future actionable, such as predictions, models and scenarios.” With that statement it shows that every individual participates through action and strategies to anticipate anything unpleasant that will affect our future. From Design Futuring, I also got to understand how the STEEP analysis works, this analysis could also helps the futuring method more easily, and also a tool to prompt a discussion and flesh out various societal factors in a future scenario, besides that it is used to evaluate external factors that may impact our design or strategy decisions to built the future we want. 

                 Humans are social individuals, they can’t live without others, human and technology relationships become significant along with the technology that is developing and evolving rapidly. Technology has become a huge part of our lives. I could say that humans can’t live without technology and the more technology develops, the more people depend on it. “Humans are inherently technological beings or tool users. We are deficient beings who use technology to complement, enhance, or disburden ourselves. Technology has without a doubt become a central part of the human condition for better and worse. It influences us, just as much as we influence it, in our daily lives, but also as moral and ethical beings” (Department of philosophy, 2017). 

                 The development of technology brought so much change and impacts to peoples lives, “technological development is the overall process of invention, innovation and diffusion of technology or processes” (“Technological change,” 2021). The new invention, the process of developing technology, and the strong belief towards technology makes the relationships between human and technology become stronger and serious. Especially with the present situation in which the global pandemic has changed the way people live their lives, they have to adapt to the changes that brought difficulties when it comes to human’s relationship, such as experiencing a social distancing, not be able to travel within city and also abroad because of the restriction and also not be able to socialize and meet with our friends and family, thus everything we do is based upon technology either it is work or school. With this situation, unintentionally we depend on technology and the more the technology evolves, the more we need it, moreover technology is the one that allows us to access all activity and information during this situation and that makes humans more attached to it. 

               The technology that genuinely influences how we live is Artificial Intelligence (AI). “Today, AI generally is thought to refer to “machines that respond to stimulation consistent with traditional responses from humans, given the human capacity for contemplation, judgment, and intention” (West, 2018). Artificial Intelligence plays a big role in people's life such as robots, self-driving cars, smart assistants, social media monitoring, and many more gave a huge influence to people’s daily basis activity. I'm going to focus more on one particular type of Artificial Intelligence which is smart assistants, “A smart assistant – also known as a virtual assistant – is a form of software installed in a smart device (such as a smart speaker or a smartphone) that can perform tasks or services, or answer questions. They're essentially the link between us and smart technology software and are essential for controlling smart plugs, smart thermostats and similar devices” (Lynch, 2020). Smart assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Google assistant, and many more affect our life starting from how we live, how we do things for example, cooking, sleeping, dating, socializing and many more. With the connection between us and the smart technology software within those smart assistants, it enables us to do things more easily and more practically compared with when Artificial Intelligence hasn’t been developed. Smart assistants really helps humans on their daily activities especially around households and also navigations, but besides it influence a positive aspect it is also give us a negative one such as lessen communication between humans and also redefining communication, “Certainly when interaction with voice-assistants becomes more common, it might become more difficult to distinguish at what point they will penetrate our everyday language. Even more so it will be difficult to tell apart the appropriate way of communication since what ‘appropriate communication’ means might evolve together with these technologies” (Kudina, n.d.).  Both positive and negative aspects genuinely influence humans on their life, some of the people become addicted to technology because they think it is the only way to survive or to live because of their strong belief on high advanced technology, but what we have to remember is that Humans are a social individuals where we can’t live without other peoples not with technology. 

The Maze Runner is a movie taken from a novel created by James Dashner, this movie comes with a Dystopian survival genre (see figure 1). Dystopian itself is “a fictional community or  society that is undesirable or frightening, Dystopias are also often characterized by rampant fear or distress, tyrannical governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society” (“Dystopia,” 2021). IPL (n.d.) noted that Dystopia is a representation of imperfect society and survival is one of the emerging themes in dystopian literature. Every human learned to survive in their certain society and made the pathways to their future. Dystopian literature would focus on the ruined society and it was important and hard to survive. The Maze Runner shows a group with several people settled in a place they don't even know about with limited equipment and food, and the only way out is to get through a maze (see figure 2) they don't know whether there are an  animals or viruses and others negative aspects that could danger their live, this film is a dystopian survival genre, a film where they have to survive even if they have to sacrifice other people even if they are best friend or family (see figure 3). 

    This Scenario is not possible to happen, the word possible means that it is hundred percent sure or capable to happen without any problem or contradiction. In this context, I compare the scenario from “The Maze Runner'' with the situation we are currently experiencing, which is the global pandemic. These two scenarios have something in common, where we all struggle to fight against the pandemic and try not to be exposed to the virus. But, unlike the movies, we have highly advanced technology, families, and friends that could help and support us, moreover any medical or other supplies that we need are all provided by governments, besides that all the countries are working very hard to bring back the normal life we had. 

    Living with a plausible future with a bunch of people that we don’t even know or recognize and have to survive with them seems not acceptable for people that live in the present. But a plausible future could happen based on actions and causes that have already occurred (Swanson, 2021).  Seeing the current situation that we live in, a pandemic happened because of the action that humans did in the past which is the lack of intensivity and lack of responsibility on what we do, what we eat, what we touch, what we say, and many more. With this kind of situation “The Maze Runner” scenario is plausible to happen to us in the future if we don’t care about the actions that we did. 

    As I have said in the plausible and possible analysis, this scenario could happen but also uncertain to happen. The Actions that we did in the past and present really matter and could have a huge influence on our future. All of this scenario, either it is likely or unlikely to happen, depends on humans themselves whether we could keep and maintain a utopian or healthy future, or we keep the human’s ignorant behaviour and let all the negative or even dystopian future to happen. 

Social : People extremely try so hard to survive, some of them are interacting with each other and even consider each other as family realizing they don’t have anyone else beside each other, but there are also a person with a high egotistical in which they only care about themselves and their own safety without caring the others. 

Technological : There is no technology like we have right now such as smartphones or any other devices. The only technology they have is a weapon to help them survive. There is highly advanced technology which is controlled and held by the governments or the community that put them inside the maze. 

Economical : The economy is bad, because they are controlled by the community or the governments. 

Environmental : The environment can be very dangerous due to viruses that they don’t know where and what causes the virus, but in other contexts the environment is natural, because they live outdoor with nature moreover  a lot of greenery even though it is very difficult to get food

Political : the political situation has the same situation with a dictator kind of politics, where someone’s life is controlled by an organization or community and keeping them captive with violence, harshness, and no mercy. 

              I live in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the current situation of the pandemic is quite bad, where we are still experiencing a tight lockdown. I was planning to interview a random person that I met in public, but due to the lockdown I couldn't do that, so I decided to do the interview with one of my closest friends. She is one of my closest friends, her name is Nabila Fithriandina Syafira. Among my friends she’s the most mature and has a long-minded perspective about the future. That's why I picked her as my participant. Even though she is majoring in Korean Language, she is known as the mom of my friend's group and she always has the solution and responsibility if one of us in the group is having a quarrel or conflict. 

    For the first question, I asked her regarding the future that she imagines or she wants, and she answered that in the context of technology, she is sure that the development of technology will keep evolving and new inventions will keep appearing, and with that she imagined her future would be holographic kind of future, where Virtual Reality, hologram, haptic feedback are really significant and popular. She also mentioned regarding me and her own country which is Indonesia, she bring up about how in the future Indonesia maybe haven’t developed with those technology, but other countries such as Japan, China, and western countries would likely have holographic kind of future near. 

    For the second question, I asked about the changes from the past until now. She answered that the most significant changes that she observed are how technology is evolving more and more, the environment that she lives in, people’s habits and behaviours, and lastly how people dress. Her answers made me realize that technology really has a huge influence on how people live, the changes on human’s habits and behaviour, the way we dress are all related to technology because it has a lot of information and knowledge for us to acknowledge that led to changes that happened. 

    For the third question, I asked regarding her opinion and thoughts about humans depending on technology such as holograms, robots or Artificial Intelligence. She answered that with us depending on technology that means that we could lose our communication ethic and could also lose our social skills or ability. She reminds me that humans are social individuals where we can’t live without others, even though at the end our future will be dependent on technology but it is different when we actually socialize or communicate with others face-to-face. “Haptic feedback is a crucial sensorial modality in virtual reality interactions, in which it provides such sensorial data. Haptic feedback groups the modalities of force feedback and tactile feedback , in which the force feedback produce data on a virtual object hardness, weight, and inertia, meanwhile the tactile feedback deliver the user a feel of the virtual object surface contact geometry, smoothness, slippage, and temperature” (Burdea, 1999). With this development of Virtual Reality’s features where we could feel other touch even though we are far away from each other could be the solution for our possible future, but even though we could feel their touch, the affection that other people give us in reality is so much better and convincing rather than using this haptic feedback feature. 

    For the fourth question, I asked regarding our future whether it will be a Utopian or Dystopian future, and she answered with two separate contexts. The first context is that she talked about me and her own country, Indonesia. She answered that Indonesia would likely lead to Dystopian future, because as long as she lives in Indonesia she could see that the peoples have an extremely high egosis and lack of intensitivity and this could lead to dystopia where we can’t live and can't do things freely as we want. The second context is about the world as a whole, she noted that if we see the world as a whole it would lead to a Utopian future, because everyone could helps each other even though they are at different countries with different personality, the negative and positive aspects we have could complete each other to make a better future but that also depends on how the peoples themselves act. 

    For the fifth question, which is the last question, I asked about her imagination of herself in the near future. She answered that she could picture herself living in different countries with her little family, stable economy, and also has the job she dreams of. Moreover, she pictured herself in the future with a highly advanced technology that could help her on a daily basis especially with household but also the kind of technology that gives a positive aspect for everyone whether it is for humans, non-humans, and other participants that live in it.