Just remembered to document something from several weeks before. We watched a video called “The Art of Asking Better Questions” and answered several questions during class. (video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYnGiWlwcj4)

My answers are as follows:

What ideas/phrases have stayed with you?
Childlike questions can turn into sth more concrete(within the mind of an adult) in an adult-driven world.------Jonathon Keats

We're hierarchical creatures that don't want to shame ourselves.------Tim Ferris


Which speaker made you curious to know more about their work?
Jonathon Keats. What he said about adults thinking that childlike/stupid questions are "inappropriate" really struck me, because I tend to worry about stepping over the line when I want to ask sth that is considered absurd in the adult world.


What are some "stupid" questions you have after watching these videos?
Will we get sth different if we interview kids? Or if we ask a kid(a normal one, not a child genius) to give a presentation/talk?

To me, one speaker stood out amongst others: Jonathon Keats. So I researched his work further, and found that he had an experiment in which he attempted to genetically engineer God and to determine its place on the evolutionary tree.

And I was like, woooow.

I was really interested in anything related to Mythology and Belief(it was a HUGE chunk in my Box of Uncertainties, where I quoted Puddleglum’s belief in Narnia’s existence when he was trapped in a darker world), and I’m currently searching for modes of media other than novels, audiobooks and visual images(film and television) to demonstrate fiction. This is exactly what I was looking for.

In this project, Keats aimed to explore the intersection of science and religion by attempting to create a physical being that could be considered God. This project was more of a thought experiment rather than a scientific endeavor, which excites me because I didn’t know there was such a thing called a thought experiment;)

Keats focused more on exploring the concept rather than a literal scientific experiment. He wasn’t successful in creating a God(unsurprisingly). But he did manage to spark discussions about the nature of God, the boundaries of science, and the role of art. His initial intention was to use art and philosophy to challenge assumptions and provoke conversations, not to literally create a deity.

This is somehow extremely relatable to what I’m currently doing and searching for in my own project. I’ll sort out the logic later. This entry is literally something that I remembered was important for me but forgot to document immediately at that time.

(https://www.wired.com/2004/09/engineering-god-in-a-petri-dish/)

Adding a definition of thought experiments here:

Thought experiments are mental exercises that involve creating hypothetical situations to explore a concept, theory, or question. They act like simulations in your mind, allowing you to play out scenarios that might be impossible or impractical in the real world.

Research Question

How can we reduce the negative psychological impact of result-based education on current and former students?

(Changing details a few days later)

How can we disrupt the psychological impact of result-based education on current and former students?

what

My topic centers on the education system and the psychological impact it has on individuals. I’m interested in the fact that individuals within a society are required to form a balance of order and chaos, and education teaches individuals how to follow rules and to maintain order in a macroscopic sense. This either boosts idiosyncratic traits within individuals outside the education system or it suppresses it.

why

When an education system is result-oriented, it fuels a continuing belief in students (current and former), and we project it into whatever environment we enter next. From my knowledge, this belief is quite common globally, especially in Asian countries, and a lot of people are suffering mentally (and sometimes physically) from it. People would complain about it on scattered safe spaces on the Internet when they are outside the system and away from the rules physically.

Personally I have this belief as well and I’m still unlearning it.

how

Result-based education, or any system that labels an individual, is adding a fictional shadow to that individual. And when this system is large enough to contain enough people to form a collective story, it creates a collective belief that your fictional shadow created by the system is who you are.

I aim to create a similar fictional worldview (an alternate or parallel reality) and set that as a background for future interviews and interventions. This alternate reality is a safe space for stakeholders because with me as the creator of this fiction, I could make sure that people can enter and exit this world freely without getting immersed in it to the extent that they believe it as their reality. The worst they’ll receive is a trigger warning or a vaccine of what is actually happening in the real world. I also encourage skeptical comments about the worldbuilding itself because my own thoughts are subjective and aren’t open enough, feedback like this will be invaluable to this project.

what if

I’m hoping that people will be more skeptical/critical of the system they are in at the moment, that they’ll not only have the clarity of mind to question the system in their head, but also the courage to use the system to their own benefits.

In this project, I am not only the creator and researcher of this project, I am also one of the stakeholders because I am a former student of result-based education. I’m hoping that there will be more people(quantitatively) who obtains more agency in the education system and develop a more active than passive way of learning themselves.

reading list

Derren Brown: “Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine”

Derren Brown: “Tricks of the Mind”

George Orwell: “1984”

Aldous Huxley: “Brave New World”

Bryan Caplan: “The Case Against Education”

Michel Foucault: “Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge Classique” (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason)

Adam Curtis: “The Century of the Self”(a documentary)

PoorRolemodel (2023). What is an ARG? [online] ARGCREATOR. Available at: https://argcreator.com/what-is-an-arg/ [Accessed 2 May 2024].

Reflecting on what I wrote:

Am I still talking about education, or am I talking about something else?

Do I stick to education or do I explain this phenomenon from a perspective that is more abstract?

We mapped out our thinking process in the shape of a snail, starting from creating the Box of Uncertainties to what our research question is up till now.

Updating my research question:

How can we disrupt the psychological impact of result-based education on current and former students?

P.S. Interventions, in my opinion, is creating chaos/disrupting order healthily when this “order” is generating negative things. In this scenario we can no longer hold the binary belief that order is good and chaos is bad.

Audience(if there is an audience or whoever is reading this), be prepared, because this blog is going to get a LOT more chaotic from now on.

I chose to map everything out during spring break because I was getting tangled in my own thoughts.

This is basically a physical version of my internal thoughts. I’ve linked everything that I thought was objectively(and subjectively) logical.

I got a bit stuck when we were asked to draw a mind map turning time into space——I interpreted it as mapping out what we imagine our action would be from May to November.

When I realised that I was basically copying what I had already done before, I turned the page over.

A project evolving is a bit like the evolving of a plot in a story. Hence, quoting Neil Gaiman: “And then what happens?”(in his words, this sentence always pushes a story forward)

Using fiction as an intervention is an easy thing to say(and to write in essays and anything made up with words) but it’s a harder thing to plan, and even harder to actually take action. Letting go of reality and rules and the norm is harder than I thought as well, because our minds are used to a certain way of thinking, and we forget that what already exists in reality was once imagination, a thought or an idea in a person’s head, and if that thought had been different, or was changed during its evolvement, the world we live in might have been veeeeeery different from what we are used to now.

I don’t know a lot about what happens next. But I do know that if I asked someone about the education system, they would show their immediate views about it(I’ve been mostly focusing on the negative side of people’s comments because there were a LOT of negative comments, and they never really appear in an interview sort of conversation, they mostly appeared in a conversation-in-the-bar-and-everyone-was-tipsy sort of conversation), and then, reading and understanding psychological and societal phenomenons, I would catagorize those comments.

And, at least to me, reading fiction(dystopian and speculative fiction) like 1984 and Brave New World REALLY helps to link psychological and societal methodologies to facts I witness and comments I hear in real life.

I think interviews are the last thing I could do to get evidence because people don’t usually feel safe enough to tell the truth in that environment, because they know an interview will be recorded and documented and sent to other people and an unknown audience. The comments I saw on social media(in China) addressing this topic sound much more REAL. Up till now, starting an intervention on social media addressing this topic is probably going to get more genuine reaction compared with an interview.

This is an example of an alternate reality game. The creator uploaded 8 videos on Bilibili, introducing 8 stages of the game, and created an uploading area for players to upload their answers. I loved this game because people were really actively engaging in solving the mystery in the narrative. And it helps because the central plot of this game is about Final Exams. (a bit like Squid Game actually)

Just remembered, I lost definitions of words I was originally really certain of (Fiction, Storytelling, Narrative etc), but then I decided to stick to my own understanding of those terms because I had to have an initial definition of those words in order to communicate.

We also did a “Theory of Change” worksheet on our individual projects.

Ummm…based on what I have up till now, I’ll probably need to redo it.

My research question had morphed and evolved. This is the newest version:

How can dystopian fiction reduce the negative psychological impact of result-based education on current and former students?

I replaced “we” with “dystopian fiction”. It was originally “How can we reduce the impact of……”

TBC.

Recently had doubts about my individual project, because during the preparation for EPP, I found my project getting more and more political, in the sense that my project is pushing me to become an activist. I had this realisation when I found myself searching through different political eras throughout Chinese history and chatting to my friends from a variety of different backgrounds about their perspective of Chinese education.

And I stopped myself, because this feels wrong. I came with the initial goal to create change with fiction. While learning the origins of Chinese education is beneficial because the result-based education system is itself a “fictional” world that generates/encourages a certain mode of belief, is fiction the best way to create maximum change? One fact I do know is that it is certainly the best way for me, as an individual, to create change.

On a personal level, reading and creating fiction brings me joy, and on a societal level, fiction condenses macroscopic views into a world that is easier to comprehend.

emmmm okayyy here’s a thought:

Result-based education system is fictional.

The way you are educated is fictional. They tell you about a fictional world(whether good or bad, if it can be defined that way)

This reality that you form, whether as a student or as a graduate, is a fiction edited from the objective truth.

Richard’s idea: curating a movement of fiction/artwork/screaming(??) with rules and guidelines.(to do whaaaat…?)(to project this view to younger people?)(because there is a religion/belief going on that should be broken or unlearned.)(By curating this movement, people are not just letting off steam on the internet, they’re also giving off a warning to youngsters who are just stepping into this environment).

This itself would be a platform for fiction.

And that goes back to the education system(grades, ranks, hierarchies, etc) being fictional.

e.g. feedback on unit 2, the one next to the letter grades, gives u a small story of who u are(which clearly is one-sided and therefore untrue, but it is a brilliant example). Young students tend to believe it to be their own personality and that’s why they are negatively impacted when their grades are relatively bad…

Two works of fiction I could add to research:

The “Three Body Problem” by Cixin Liu.

and Dungeons and Dragons(a game I’m not familiar with).

And of course, 1984.

I need to remind myself to take action(interventions) rather than just analysing the same information again and again.

The Religion of Results: A Critical Examination of Result-Based Education

I. Introduction: The Grip of Results

My topic centers on the positive and negative impact of result-based education (RBE) on students, teachers, and parents, mainly focusing on middle schools and high schools in China. This form of education operates as a pervasive belief system, a Religion of Results. In this system, students are being instilled a rigid definition of success and failure that is solely based on test scores and rankings. Hallways in high schools are plastered with long lists of rankings for every exam, constantly reminding students of their current position. As Bryan Caplan stated in his book “The Case Against Education”, such systems often function primarily as signaling mechanisms. High scores become a badge for students, not necessarily of their knowledge, but of their ability to conform and persevere.

Take English classes, for example. In China, schools present students with formulas of grammar and lists of vocabulary to memorize. using this method of learning, students become adept at churning out formulaic sentences during classes and exams, which offers little practical use in real-world conversations with native speakers. This example proves that this system prioritizes results over genuine understanding of knowledge and stifles the development of independent thinking.

II. The Impact Inside the School Environment: Pressures and Benefits

The negative impact of RBE is undeniable, particularly for students. Schools encourage students to focus on the “correct” answer based on textbooks, which contained only a rough overview of knowledge from a specific field. Critical analysis of said knowledge is subtly discouraged, because it is seen as a distraction from the singular focus on achieving the “correct” answer. This, adding rewards and punishments, creates passive learners. Students’ physical and mental health suffers as well in this environment and are constantly neglected and deemed unimportant compared to their performance in class.

However, acknowledging the negative impact of RBE doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any potential benefits. Quite the contrary. After consulting a friend from a university in Shenzhen, I learned that RBE is a gateway to abundant knowledge and educational opportunities that is otherwise unavailable for students from remote areas who value their financial needs way above expressing any form of creativity. Standardized tests, while flawed, can offer a level playing field, a chance for every student to overcome socioeconomic barriers.

Teachers, another major stakeholder of any education system, is impacted by RBE as well. Unlike the students, they can see a bigger picture of the phenomenon. And while they must follow the rules of the system, they are doing their best to make change in their own way, structurally and emotionally.

Going back to my former high school, I joined a 15-min physics class for the senior grade 3 students (preparing for their College Entrance Exams) with my teacher’s consent. My former physics teacher, while clearly aware of the effects of RBE, employed a teaching method that minimized the time for passive learning, leaving abundant time for students to organize on their own. My teachers, although exhausted by the high pressure of classes, always tried their best to make their own small changes within the system. Their fatigue vanished when they were teaching in class, providing emotional as well as structural support to the students. Looking at this phenomenon no longer as a stakeholder but as a researcher was quite memorable to me. Another stakeholder in this system are the parents. They were once students of RBE as well. Whether they were considered successful or not, they would have an expectation for their children in education. Their emotional and psychological wellbeing are harmed because they care for the future of their children (therefore in this context, they care about the results). This system does put a pressure on them to prioritize their children’s academic performance over holistic development.

III.  The Impact Beyond the School Environment: The “Religion of Results”

Why do I call this phenomenon a Religion of Results? While the system does lack deities or supernatural elements, it does function similarly, shaping students’ minds and fostering a conditioned way of thinking. Result-based education fosters a secular religion in its stakeholders, especially the student group. According to the Bandwagon Effect, it’s easier to manipulate a crowd than an individual because of social pressures, so the larger the crowd of believers, the easier perceptions of success and societal expectations are changed.

In the grand scheme, breeding believers of this Religion of Results might appear beneficial. After all, it produces workers who strive to be “perfect”, and this “perfection” is defined by the creators of the system. According to Herbert Marcuse’s critique of societal repression, this comes at a devastating cost to believers of this religion: the stifling of creativity and innovation. Students become so accustomed to this results-oriented mindset that they project it onto every subsequent environment they enter.

IV. Beyond China: Comparing Different Cultural Backgrounds

The Religion of Results doesn’t just exist within China but is a global phenomenon. Comparatively, this belief is more popular in the East than in the West. The difference of labor between eastern and western cultures causes the difference of education. Western RBE centers on capitalism and Eastern RBE centers on several diverse backgrounds but has communism roots. That’s the core reason why the education system are so different in those areas.

With that research in mind, I started broadening my scope and searching for evidence beyond China. I consulted someone who had education experiences in both Thailand and New Zealand, the feedback I got was that New Zealand was much freer in education, but it was also more chaotic, and students had a lot of fights and the school couldn’t really control them. With this information in mind, I maintain that we need to form a balance between the freedom of individuals and the order of society within the area of education.

V. Conclusion: Seeking Balance beyond Standardized Tests

RBE provides stability and promotes national competitiveness that comes at a cost of stifling innovation and critical thinking. For financially challenged people, this is an amazing opportunity, but it remains a problem for potential creatives.

Students are not connecting the dots of why they have this belief of results. They can’t see the entire picture that I’m only beginning to see now, with the luxury of being in another educational environment where critical thinking and failing is encouraged. The change I want to see is for more people to witness this macroscopic view. I want students to deconstruct information, separate fact from fiction, and challenge what they’re taught. Students, as well as parents and teachers, should form a metaphorical shield in a result-based environment.

As artistic protests are scattered around different social media platforms right now, we need to create a movement or form an online platform where potential creatives could express their ideas freely. Adding a little chaos within the order of results is needed in this world.

Reference:

Caplan, B. (2019). The Case against Education. Princeton University Press.

admin (2020). ‘Secular religion’ in the Wikipedia. [online] Tamás Nyirkos. Available at: https://nyirkos.com/secular-religion-in-the-wikipedia/ [Accessed 7 Apr. 2024].

Investopedia Team (2023). What Is the Bandwagon Effect? Why People Follow the Crowd. [online] Investopedia. Available at: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bandwagon-effect.asp.

Farr, A. (2021). Herbert Marcuse. Summer 2021 ed. [online] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/#Rep.

This entry lists primary and secondary research for the EPP Project. I’m currently unsure of how to word the topic, so I’m putting bullet points below and string them into a topic in the end.

Result-based education, psychology, mind control, application of fiction and illusion.

back to High School

I flew back to Beijing for a couple of reasons, one of which was to revisit my old high school where result-based education took place. I had several reasons for revisiting that was project-based: 1. To have a chat with my previous teachers, because I only had a student’s point of view on this topic; 2. To see the current work of students, and to observe how they interact with teachers in class and with fellow students; and 3. (which is slightly more abstract) Revisiting a place that had great emotional impact to me 5 years ago will re-stimulate that impact, and I will be able to remember more.

The teachers: They told me that they felt gratified that we as former students would tell them how our lives went through because they were stuck in a cycle of teaching students year after year.

the mode of teaching of my physics teacher: 15min at noon after lunch. He’s trying to make everything as efficient and as simple as possible for students to absorb, because he knows we’re in a result-based education background and the way students are accessed is by memorizing formulas of physics while a very small part of the test is designed for ppl who actually understand physics. (80% of memorizing formulas, 20% of understanding and analysing actual physics) so if you memorize everything on that sheet of paper, you can get 80 in physics in the College Entrance Exam. It’s that simple.

(How in the world can you find evidence to students’ minds??? I can’t directly assume that they have a linear way of thinking or not just by observing their behavior in a 15-min class) David’s email really helped with that.

Secondary Research

Psychology, how you control the mind, whether or not you control your individuality amongst society and if it makes a “better” impact,

Had a chat with Risa and her opinion on the rules of school was that it made sense and helped her to become who she is right now, so it had a positive impact rather than negative.

Risa: experience in both education systems in New Zealand and Thailand.

The Third-Wave Experiment…

the change I wanna see is people becoming more awake and aware of the controlling of their own minds when they are in a crowd.

I’m doing a project that is about how individuals’ minds are altered and controlled and their idiosyncrasies are suppressed in a result-based education background. Students in this type of background(I have limited the location to China) have a sort of secular Religion of Results, and define their success based on other people’s failures. The Believers of this “Religion of Results” have a conditioned thinking that is linear and beneficial to the development of China as a whole.

I have researched several psychological experts like Edward Bernays, the Freuds, and Herbert Marcuse(as well as B.F. Skinner, Ewen Cameron, and Jordan Peterson), and they have ideas that contradict each other on whether individuals’ inner drives are evil and whether it should be repressed to gain a more orderly society. With result-based education(RBE) in Chinese middle schools, high schools and universities, individuality is repressed and conformity is encouraged. This is good for the development of society as a whole, but bad for creative students, as well as students with Diverse Learning Styles, include students with dyslexia, ADHD,(very few are diagnosed in China) or those who learn best through hands-on experiences.

The main recipients I’m focusing on are the students, the stakeholders are students, parents, teachers, workplace employers, etc. I have done primary research on this topic by going back to my high school, mingling into the group of students and chatting with my former teachers. My school was very cautious on not letting any knowledge-based context leak out, so knowing that I wouldn’t necessarily get anything valuable if I told them I was researching for my topic, I went undercover and with my teacher’s consent, joined a 15-min physics class where the senior grade 3 students took every noon after lunch. I also observed what the teachers chose to ask a 2019 graduate. They mainly asked about the content of my MA and how it would benefit me to get a job in Beijing. Backtracking to my topic, I witness the majority of Chinese students are ignorant and only think in a linear way(currently unsure about how to prove that with the evidence I’ve got, I have some interviews on this topic back in 2021&2022, I’m skeptical to conduct interviews NOW for fear of conformation bias), and I witnessed that we were reluctant to speak our ideas in class when we were out of that sector.

I plan to conduct interviews with school counselors and examine the function of school counselors in Chinese high schools and universities, both research methods are used to find out what Chinese students are worried and anxious about. And whether they trust a school counselor to help them with their psychological concerns. (Currently unsure whether this part is relevant to the Religion of Results)

The change I REALLY want to see is for students, especially youngsters in middle schools and high schools, be AWARE(VERY aware) of what they are learning and be more critical and conduct more self-learning than just passively absorb what is taught in class. I have already seen content creators expressing their ideas about the by-products of result-based education on Chinese social media platforms such as Red and Bilibili, which attacks that linear mode of thinking by projecting the macroscopic view in a magnified dystopian way. People, especially youngsters(or the younger generation), are waking up after seeing their work and I plan to ask them (or do research on them about) their initial thoughts on why they created their work on this topic and what impact they have witnessed due to their art.

Changing the mindset is quite hard for it requires a psychological twist. I’m adding Derren Brown shows in this paragraph because I think I can learn from how he does his experiments in the streets and how he conducts his shows on the topics of creating illusions and mind control. I aim to write about the movement of social media on battling result-based education using art and creative methods, and how the minds of the audience(especially the students) had changed psychologically.

I’m writing a reflective piece of writing (1000 – 1300 words) describing how I have arrived at the stage of planning impact and change. It should also include a bibliography of source materials that I have used. This piece of reflective writing is supposed to give substance to a presentation which is a 3-min project pitch for the European Press Prize (a journalism competition).

Could you give me bullet points to outline what I should write in my reflective writing? Please contain a clear logic focusing on the topic of the impact of the Psychology of Young “Believers” in “Religion of Results”.

Cecilia’s lecture on Unorthodox AI

Louason’s idea of the creator of GOD(which is a bit irrelavent to our project but I thought I’d take note)

Lee’s workshop. Creating a map of your individual view of a future scenario.

Linking Project 4 to my Box of Uncertainties (and applying what I learned in Unit 2), I aimed my focus on result-based education which is common in middle and high schools in China.

The two pages shown below are my initial notes on the definition and background of result-based education. I am aware that I lack secondary research in this area, so these pages consists of mostly assumptions(that is slowly morphing into understanding) of why this phenomenon exists in the majority of schools in China.

QUESTION: How can individuality within creative students be preserved in a result-based education environment(using fictional storytelling)?

Project 4 is a major self-directed research project, which involves investigating and identifying a meaningful area of inquiry which has not yet been explored. My project centers on mythology, religion, belief and result-based education in China.

My assumption is that students in result-based education are taught to form a belief of being perfect and taught a linear way of defining good and bad, much like the definition between heaven and hell in many mythological tales. After researching the Third Wave Experiment in 1967, I realized several things: 1. Fiction has functional uses in education, and 2. people lose their minds in a crowd and forget to think individually, and therefore it is easier to teach a crowd a biased definition of good and bad than to teach an individual.

I admit that I am biased towards this phenomenon because result-based education really built the way I think as a student and I found myself almost incapable of having a meter of my own about things I see and I am anxious that my work wouldn’t be “perfect” by academic terms.(Because we are taught to rank our success based on other people’s failures). I used to read ancient mythology(Norse, Greek, Roman, Egyptian) and fictional tales as a way to escape and form a safe haven for my individual idiosyncrasies when I was taught to believe that those things are not a part of true academic learning in middle school.

After all that being said, result-based education is actually the best possible solution that we as a country has come up with after a pretty rocky part of history, because we are aiming to transform from an agricultural country to an industrial country(or a developing country to developed country) in the shortest possible time, and in order to achieve that, China as a whole will need an abundant number of workers who believes wholeheartedly in a collective sense of honor and a fixed definition of success and failure(which is defined by the leaders, who changes those definitions according to the direction that we as a country are going after.

If I look at this phenomenon from a macroscopic view, I would think that this is a clever and efficient tactic. (I have compared this to the novel 1984 but personally I think it was too negative of a comparison, this particular phenomenon has achieved really positive outcomes, if it hasn’t, it wouldn’t have survived this long). I emphasize that this phenomenon is invisible to most young individuals in school who are going through their primary and secondary years of education. I maintain that we show this to them in some way that they would understand what they would be going through before actually going through it, for that might change their entire perspective to what they are learning. This has already been done by multiple artists and content creators in China where they post their work on platform(Bilibili, Red and Weibo,etc) which attacks that linear mode of thinking by projecting the macroscopic view in a magnified dystopian way, and it overjoys me that they are receiving answers from the audience online saying that they hear them and agree with them. People, especially youngsters(or the younger generation, are waking up).

There’s something emotionally uncomfortable in the process of this project. I think I’m trying to understand this phenomenon in Project 4 so I could use it as a basis and go a step further when I do my individual project, and focus more on telling fictional stories, mythology, religion, and belief, because I don’t plan on being caught by this narrative for too long (because if I do, I’ll simply be telling the same story over and over again). I understand that I can’t change this macroscopic phenomenon itself, but I could change the way people observe it, and therefore bring a change to the mindset of people inside this phenomenon, especially youngsters. (This is where fiction and belief comes in.)

The center of my Box of Uncertainties has always been fiction, mythology and belief, why people chose to create and believe in the definition of God. I think of it as a filter or a lens. People look through this filter/lens to see the world they want to see, and some have the ability to tinker on the lens of others, so their perspective of the world is changed, either for better or for worse.

I aim, in this project, and in my work as a whole, to be a tinkerer. I want to learn the craft of tinkering different lenses to either expose the more objective truth or to let people see a potentially better world.

(And definitely communicate with other tinkerers because defining a specific world as “potentially better” as an individual could be dangerous).

Monday

(Uploading the journal right now instead of once a week in order to not forget:)

Tutorials this Monday was brilliant because we were given new insight on the length and depth of our project. David helped us understand the definition of the meaning of the words “analysis” and “evaluation” and linking that to iteration and change in the working process.

Analysis: to break things down into smaller parts.

Evaluation: (centering on "value" in the word) to figure out what's valuable when it's out of context.

It’s like breaking down a clock and figuring out the individual uses of the cogs and components.

The importance of focusing and documenting on iteration/evolution instead of focusing on change is to take note of the entire process instead of focusing on the outcome.

Louason linked the above to the cone of possibilities, and his words reminded me that we need to open our mindset and be speculatively imaginative about the future or what we think is the future.

To me the highlight of this tutorial is when we are advised to create a persona in order to tell our stories to. Khyathi presented a great example of this: if we put someone who has worked in a technical company in the present and then fast-forward time to 5000 years later, what would that someone look like physically? This example uses speculation as a muscle and projecting the objective truth from a specific corner of the workplace.

This reminds me of a quote Lee stated during Monday morning: Speculation based on current knowledge is only fantasy, and only speculation based on concrete and up-to-date research has the possibility to create change.

Personally I’m learning a lot from my peers in many aspects, and while I am straight outside my comfort zone, I’m slowly getting more comfortable being uncomfortable. I still struggle being logical with my words and I have trouble linking the readings and abstract definitions to phenomenons in the real world that we have been talking about, but I aim to be better at that.

Tuesday

We had quite a heated discussion during classes today consisting of a distinct change of our project direction. We decided to focus on how technology is slowly but surely replacing human labour in workplaces, and therefore changing the dynamic of interpersonal relationships in workplaces. We are focusing mainly on the hospitality section in tech companies, such as the office canteens as well as gyms and swimming pools.

We started creating a fictional workspace with the five of us each representing a persona. Disagreement arose during the discussion when we debated over whether the workers knew that the technology they’re developing is going to be the exact thing that replace their actual roles in the industry. The majority of us agreed that while most of the workers knew this speculation as a rumor or a myth, they seldomly acknowledge it as the truth. So the main function of our project is to show this macroscopic phenomenon in its entire glory, and arise the speculation inside the heads of workers.

We have currently decided on a location which is the canteen section in Google. We hope to gather first-hand information and record data that could provide new insight to our assumptions, and eventually turn them into understanding on the entire phenomenon.

Currently I have a lot inside my head that I have yet to put into words and I’m feeling slightly overwhelmed, so there are still a lot of information that I haven’t written down. I will update this journal entry shortly.

TBC.