A two year project 2016-2018, the Collaboration for Humane Technologies catalyzed innovators from design, health care, science, humanities and the arts around creative research at the intersection of physical and virtual experience. Seeking to intervene directly in creating better futures, participants in this vibrant interdisciplinary community embraced collaboration, nuance and complexity. We made games, virtual reality experiences, interactive installations, animations, data visualizations, objects, live performances and whatever else we needed to invent given the problem or need we were tackling. Our projects foreground well-being, movement, creative open-ended play, compassion, personal agency and collaboration. The work is inspired by design innovator Bret Victor‘s provocation:

“What might it be like to work, to play, to share and to think in more dynamic mediums that access our full multi-sensory human capacities? ” -Bret Victor, design innovator

This question sits at the heart of the Collaboration for Humane Technology research and public events. Humane tech – that is, technology that is responsive to how humans learn, think, and create and thrive has to be the future of tech.

Download our HUMANE TECH DECK, conversations to inspire dialog and creative exchange within your community.

FACILITATING CREATIVE RESEARCH

At the center of this two year public practice project was my interest as a facilitator in supporting collaboration and innovation that happens across time and project scales (small and large, fast and intense, long and sustained). I created and hosted several Pop-Ups events in 2017 and 2018 centering technology and well-being. Contributing scholar Rick Livingston wrote for one of our events

“Shall we say that a concern for well-being inheres in our notion of what is humane? The idea seems anodyne (if not anesthetic), certainly undemanding. Whose well-being? And by what measures?Maybe we should take another, closer look at well-being.  Although based on first-person reports, it is not inherently self-centered. Well-being is multi-dimensional, made up of an array of data-points, sieved through a variety of metrics. Important aspects of well-being are relational: family, friends, work, community involvements. How do we face up to vulnerability, or dependence, which is intrinsic to the human condition: natality and mortality? Something to be overcome? Care is attention in action.”

Together we developed a founding mission:

We will use new and existing technologies to promote an inclusive ethics of livability, to spark creativity and curiosity and develop tolerance for complexity.

POSTHUMAN INSPIRATION

Scholar Katherine Hayles critiques the fact that many visions of the future “point to the anti-human and the apocalyptic” and calls us to action showing that

“we can craft other visions that will be conducive to the long-range survival of humans and of the other life-forms, biological and artificial, with whom we share the planet and ourselves.”

-Katherine Hayles

Activist Frances Moore Lappe calls us to create solution stories

“Facing unprecedented challenges, we can choose to remain open to possibility and creativity—not mired in despair. Surely, the latter is a luxury that none can afford. We can create and enthusiastically share a solutions story today, every day. It is a revolutionary act.”

-Frances Moore Lappe

WHAT ARE YOUR CREATIVE ACTIONS FOR BETTER FUTURES?