For this week's recitation, our team had to give a performance using the prototype of an interactive artifact which could exist in 2124 Shanghai, and address possible challenges and consequences posed by over-reliance on technology.

For our project, we decided on the prompt of Connection Paradox (Digital Addiction) and decided to focus on the aspect of modern life of how everyone seems to be "connected" to their phones.

We designed "handcuffs" as our interactive artifact, since we felt that they could better convey the idea of people being locked to their phones, and avoiding real-world interaction altogether.

In terms of successes and failures of our artifact, I believe it succeeded in conveying the theme of Digital Addiction, but it failed in terms of both interactivity and conveying any deeper meaning. The ultimate reason this occurred was due to the fact that we rushed the process of brainstorming, and tried to settle for project proposals which were simpler and easier to achieve. While simplicity isn't necessarily a bad thing, our artifact was too literal and held almost no further thought.

In terms of interactivity of our artifact, we had planned to glue magnets to the handcuffs, so that they could connect to phones and other people's handcuffs, but since we didn't have time to wait for magnets to arrive via delivery, we decided on using double sided tape as a substitute. The simplicity made it fairly easy to showcase the connection aspect of our artifact during the performance, but it was way too simple and unreactive to be considered an interactive artifact in my book, since it only had one function and could give no form of response after being connected. Another problem with our performance other than being too short and simple, is that it didn't provide much context for why the device existed and what exactly it did, leaving the audience puzzled. Moving on, I think this may not have been the right direction for our project, and I believe that we should look for more creative and subtle ways to convey our ideas. But if I had to improve specifically on this artifact, I would add more “reactivity” to the handcuffs, such as a “happy noise” playing whenever you connect to someone else's handcuff and a warning noise if you’ve been connected to your phone for too long. It would make more sense in the context of our dystopian world.

  I was in charge of documentation of the project, so I snapped photos during each stage of the setup for the artifacts we would use during the performance. I also helped to build the “giant phone” props that we would use for the performance, as I thought that “bigger-than-life” props could be more noticeable for the audience, but the size that we settled on was a bit too large. Though it wasn’t adopted, I had also proposed an outline for a script that would focus more on the feeling of alienation felt by people who weren’t addicted to their technology, but I listened to Noctis throughout the process since they were in charge of planning the performance. Although I wasn’t in charge of the performance, I feel like I shouldn’t have been as passive as I was, since it was the whole team’s project, and a collaborative effort overall. I feel that we were mostly doing our own tasks, which wasn't a bad thing, but there wasn't as much communication I hoped for. A lot of the times, we were throwing ideas together at the last minute, and while that meant everyone could at least have a say on the each part of the project, there wasn't concrete team allocation as in who was responsible for what aspect of the project and it resulted in the project being pretty messy.

    During the recitation, I was most intrigued by Group 4’s performance of Connectolens. It fits prompt 2 (AI over-reliance) really well. The performance told the story of a girl who struggled with making friends due to her introvertedness. She ultimately is given trial for Connectolens, a pair of AI-powered glasses which help her nail and even fake conversations with the popular girl in school and ends up ruining her relationship because of it. I enjoyed how it not only addresses the problem of over-reliance of AI, but also how overextended use of technology can make life and the human experience feel artificial and ungenuine. It also touches on more subtle topics, such as information collection and user profiling, which have been a long going and serious problem as well. The performance gave plenty of context and explanation for the usage of the connectolens through extensive dialogue between the two main characters, the worker who gave the girl the glasses and even narration, which was a very thoughtful touch. The group also used words on paper to mimic the interface of the connectolens, and give the audience an idea of what the user could see. On the other hand, AI is a great way to explore interactivity, as it can literally "speak back to you", and perform actions accordingly to your words or movement. All in all, the performance was great and captivating, but I do believe what could have made it better was if we got to see more aspects of the daily life of the protagonist and how they had been changed during her trial of the connectolens, maybe with the assistance of AI to help her get through conversations, she would even start to stop truly caring and listening to others since she can just ask AI to help her make something up to keep the conversation going.