Alternative Presents and Speculative Futures: Designing fictions through the extrapolation and evasion of product lineages.

The core question addressed by this invited keynote and conference paper is how fictions are designed to negotiate, critique and realise the multiplicity of possible new technological futures. Focusing on methods, processes and strategies the presentation initially describes how things/technologies become products, employing the perspective of domestication to describe the transition from extraordinary to everyday. This development suggests a product history, a traceable lineage that goes back through generations, each one a small iteration of the previous. By modelling this lineage, design fictions can do two things: 1. Project current emerging technological development to create Speculative Futures: hypothetical products of tomorrow. 2. Break free of the lineage to speculate on Alternative Presents. These fictions effectively act as cultural litmus paper, either offering vignettes of how it might be to live with the technology in question or challenging contemporary applications of technology through demonstrable alternatives. The presentation focused on how these two types of fiction are created, how they differ from science fiction, other modes of future thinking and technological critique - more specifically how both methodologies utilise designed artefacts. What informs the development, aesthetics, behaviour, interactions and function of these objects? Once created, how and where do they operate? How can we gauge and understand their impact and meaning? As a consequence of the presentation Auger was invited to run workshops and projects in Basel (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst) and HEAD (Haute école d’art et de design), Geneva and is advising on the design of a new masters programme at the Basel Hochschule

Identification of the Isotherm Function in Chromatography Using CMA-ES

This paper deals with the identification of the flux for a system of conservation laws in the specific example of analytic chromatography. The fundamental equations of chromatographic process are highly non linear. The state-of-the-art Evolution Strategy, CMA-ES (the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy), is used to identify the parameters of the so-called isotherm function. The approach was validated on different configurations of simulated data using either one, two or three components mixtures. CMA-ES is then applied to real data cases and its results are compared to those of a gradient-based strategy

Alternative timelines: Counterfactuals as an approach to design pedagogy

Counterfactual histories modify the outcome of a historical event and then extrapolate an alternative version of history. In literature, imaginaries based on a counterfactual history can offer thought-provoking insights on contemporary life:   It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. (Dick, 1992)   The Man in the High Castle describes the consequences of one popular starting point for counterfactual histories, Germany winning World War II. Historians tend to focus on military "decision points" at which events could have taken another path (Bernstein, 2000), or they imagine the absence of powerful individuals to speculate on how things might have been different. Since history is “often written by the victors, it tends to ‘crush the unfulfilled potential of the past’, as Walter Benjamin so aptly put it. By giving a voice to the ‘losers’ of history, the counterfactual approach allows for a reversal of perspectives” (Deluermoz & Singaravélou, 2021). A counterfactual approach offers much potential as a methodology for practice-based design research and pedagogy – designers typically design for the world as it is rather than as it could be (Dunne & Raby, 2013). Design happens within entrenched systems whose foundations in many cases were laid centuries ago. Systems of economy, infrastructure and popular culture inform and constrain design methods, motivations and approaches to the evaluation of designed artefacts. Technological advances are applied via these rules, facilitating the iterative development of products and providing a neat lineage from the past and, more importantly, into the future (Auger et al, 2017). This version of design is increasingly being revealed as fundamentally flawed – highly successful in placating shareholders, it is not fit for purpose where ethical or environmental issues are concerned.   Counterfactuals provide an almost surreptitious method of combining design theory with practice. Through a rigorous analysis of history, the designer identifies key elements that are problematic when viewed through a contemporary lens. The approach can expose dominant structures of power and the influence these have on design culture and metrics: for example, the influence of legacy systems and how they limit the imagination and reveal the hidden or unexpected historical events that influenced the timeline. In A New Scottish Enlightenment, Mohammed J. Ali proposes a different outcome to the 1979 Scottish independence referendum (Debatty, 2014). A “yes” vote leads to the creation of a new Scottish government, whose ultimate goal is the delivery of energy independence and a future free from fossil fuels. The project was exhibited shortly before the 2014 referendum. This starting point (a yes or no vote) resonates because it vividly presents a life that could have been. It makes us think about the power of our vote and the potential implications of a “bad choice”. The second aspect that gives the project wider relevance is the agenda used to drive extrapolation from its fictional starting point – a simple paradigm shift on energy generation and distribution. By defining energy independence as a national goal, it becomes possible to outline the ways this might happen. Important earlier examples of a counterfactual approach to design include Pohflepp and Chambers (Auger, 2012; Dunne & Raby, 2013).   Here is a rough summary of a counterfactual design methodology:   1.      The approach begins with the choice of subject – what is to be designed and the creation of a detailed and diverse timeline of its history. 2.      The identification of key moments that have led to the state of things; in particular the elements that could be critiqued from alternative value systems. 3.      The creation of a counterfactual timeline based on numerous possibilities – this is the key difference in method between historiography and design. The approach facilitates the creation of new value systems, motivations, rules and constraints that can be applied in practice. 4.      The design of things along the new timeline; it can be furnished at key moments with artefacts informed by the alternative rules.   A recent Master’s project at the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay followed this brief. Themes included rethinking approaches to aging based on the elimination of the royalist doctrines of 18th century France; a counterfactual history of agriculture with the tool acting as intermediary between the person working and their environment; and the archive – an examination of the modalities for a deployment of queer, feminist and trans-feminist archive design forms in everyday life. With its focus on underrepresented groups and unrealised possibilities, this last concept resonates with a broader discourse about decolonising design. What alternative value systems and approaches to design might have emerged if 20th-century design history had not been defined by the works of Morris, Dreyfus, Bel Geddes, Gropius, Rams, Starck, Ives, Dyson, and the rest?   Taking up Benjamin’s point about “the unfulfilled potential of the past”, the most vital use of counterfactuals in design is to allow different voices to emerge that were drowned out by dominant or “standard” narrative(s). Recognising alternative histories can open up valuable future paths and create space for new possibilities and imaginaries to flourish. Works Cited   Auger, James (2012). Why Robot? Speculative design, the domestication of technology and the considered future. PhD thesis, Royal College of Art, London.   Auger, James, Hanna, Julian and Encinas, Enrique (2017). Reconstrained Design. Nordes, Oslo, 2-4 June 2017. ISSN 1604-9705.   Bernstein, R. B. (2000). Review of Ferguson, Niall, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3721   Chambers, James (2010). Artificial Defence Mechanisms. https://jameschambers.co.uk/artificial-defense-mechanisms   Debatty, Régine (2014). A New Scottish Enlightenment. We Make Money Not Art. https://we-make-money-not-art.com/a_new_scottish_enlightenment/   Deluermoz, Quentin & Pierre Singaravélou (2021). A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been. Yale University Press.   Dick, Phillip K. (1992). The Man in the High Castle. Vintage.   Dunne, Anthony & Fiona Raby (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.   Pohflepp, Sascha (2009). The Golden Institute. http://cargocollective.com/saschapohflepp/Work/The-Golden-Institut

Blueprint for fault-tolerant quantum computation with Rydberg atoms

We present a blueprint for building a fault-tolerant universal quantum computer with Rydberg atoms. Our scheme, which is based on the surface code, uses individually addressable, optically trapped atoms as qubits and exploits electromagnetically induced transparency to perform the multiqubit gates required for error correction and computation. We discuss the advantages and challenges of using Rydberg atoms to build such a quantum computer, and we perform error correction simulations to obtain an error threshold for our scheme. Our findings suggest that Rydberg atoms are a promising candidate for quantum computation, but gate fidelities need to improve before fault-tolerant universal quantum computation can be achieved

Afterlife Project.

As our lives are increasingly mediated by advances in science, engineering and technological interventions, the After-Life project raises the issue of our increasing faith in technology and the West’s decreasing belief in organized religion. With this in mind the afterlife project offers a technologically mediated service that offers a tangible expression of afterlife for those who have become spiritually disconnected, or require hard evidence in some form of life after death. The grieving process from an atheist’s perspective can be problematic with the concept of afterlife or other place, by definition being discounted. Fundamental to most religions is a concept of some other state or heaven, offering comfort to the faithful. What then is there for the atheist with regard to reassurance or comfort after the death of a loved one? Using a Microbial Fuel Cell we are able to capture the chemical potential of a dead loved one to create a small electrical current and store it in a battery. This battery may then be placed in a range of electronic products. This may be interpreted as a form of afterlife especially in the context of batteries, which are often described in terms of life, extra life, and now afterlife. Accepting this electronic state as life after death we are provided with a tangible proof of life after biological expiry

Reconstrained Design: A Manifesto

This manifesto marks the first anniversary of a project, Reconstrained Design, launched explicitly to challenge the state of design: its narrowing pathways, prevailing assumptions, and corporate agendas. Our manifesto takes the form of a preamble which outlines the history of the manifesto genre and its origins in the historical avant-garde of a century ago, followed by a list of 12 tenets that put forward specific design challenges (each based on or challenging a thought-provoking quotation). With this text we aim to pry open new discursive and imaginative spaces, to force new ideas into the public view, to promote engagement with politics, technology and other facets of everyday life, and to upset the status quo of design thinking. It is written in an appropriately polemical style in order to take at its word the call to provocation. We hope this manifesto will establish our project's aims while encouraging important discussions between conference participants

Fault-tolerance thresholds for the surface code with fabrication errors

The construction of topological error correction codes requires the ability to fabricate a lattice of physical qubits embedded on a manifold with a non-trivial topology such that the quantum information is encoded in the global degrees of freedom (i.e. the topology) of the manifold. However, the manufacturing of large-scale topological devices will undoubtedly suffer from fabrication errors---permanent faulty components such as missing physical qubits or failed entangling gates---introducing permanent defects into the topology of the lattice and hence significantly reducing the distance of the code and the quality of the encoded logical qubits. In this work we investigate how fabrication errors affect the performance of topological codes, using the surface code as the testbed. A known approach to mitigate defective lattices involves the use of primitive SWAP gates in a long sequence of syndrome extraction circuits. Instead, we show that in the presence of fabrication errors the syndrome can be determined using the supercheck operator approach and the outcome of the defective gauge stabilizer generators without any additional computational overhead or the use of SWAP gates. We report numerical fault-tolerance thresholds in the presence of both qubit fabrication and gate fabrication errors using a circuit-based noise model and the minimum-weight perfect matching decoder. Our numerical analysis is most applicable to 2D chip-based technologies, but the techniques presented here can be readily extended to other topological architectures. We find that in the presence of 8% qubit fabrication errors, the surface code can still tolerate a computational error rate of up to 0.1%.Comment: 10 pages, 15 figure

On the influence of statistics on the determination of the mean value of the depth of shower maximum for ultra high energy cosmic ray showers

The chemical composition of ultra high energy cosmic rays is still uncertain. The latest results obtained by the Pierre Auger Observatory and the HiRes Collaboration, concerning the measurement of the mean value and the fluctuations of the atmospheric depth at which the showers reach the maximum development, Xmax, are inconsistent. From comparison with air shower simulations it can be seen that, while the Auger data may be interpreted as a gradual transition to heavy nuclei for energies larger than ~ 2-3x10^18 eV, the HiRes data are consistent with a composition dominated by protons. In Ref. [1] it is suggested that a possible explanation of the observed deviation of the mean value of Xmax from the proton expectation, observed by Auger, could originate in a statistical bias arising from the approximated exponential shape of the Xmax distribution, combined with the decrease of the number of events as a function of primary energy. In this paper we consider a better description of the Xmax distribution and show that the possible bias in the Auger data is at least one order of magnitude smaller than the one obtained when assuming an exponential distribution. Therefore, we conclude that the deviation of the Auger data from the proton expectation is unlikely explained by such statistical effect.Comment: To be published in Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physic

Why Robot? Speculative design, the domestication of technology and the considered future

One of the enduring objects used to represent the technological future is the robot. This legacy means that its promise has the ability to evolve in accordance with our societal and cultural dreams and aspirations. It can reflect the current state of technological development, our hopes for that technology and also our fears; fundamentally though, after almost a century of media depictions and corporate promises, the robot is yet to enter our homes and lives in any meaningful way. This thesis begins by asking the question: how does an emerging technology (such as robotic) become a domestic product? In addressing this issue I draw from the theory of domestication and the method of speculative design to describe three possible technological journeys: how technology does not, does and could become a domestic product: 1. Technology does not make the transition from laboratory to domestic life. Robots have made countless departures from the habitat of the research laboratory, apparently headed towards the domestic habitat, but the vast majority never arrive. This observation leads to the identification of a third habitat and the current destination for the majority of proposed domestic robots – robot-related imaginaries. _6 In this theatre-like environment, robots exist as either promises or warnings of a potential technological future. The habitat includes technology fairs, laboratory open houses, news articles and the films and novels of science fiction. I conclude by suggesting reasons why these visions of the future so often fail to become domestic products. 2. Technology does make the transition from laboratory to domestic life. Borrowing from the science of ecology and biological concepts of evolution and domestication, I make an analogy between the shift of habitats that occurs when an organism successfully goes through the process of artificial selection (natural to domestic) and the transition an emerging technology makes in order to become a suitable product for domestic use (laboratory to domestic). 3. How technology could make the transition from laboratory to domestic life. This section makes up the core of the thesis as I describe speculative design and how it can be used to present more plausible depictions of near-future technological applications. By stepping out of the normative relationship that ties technological development to commercial markets, speculative design opens a space for alternative perspectives, critical reflection and an examination of contemporary and near-future technological application. Throughout the thesis these theoretical investigations run parallel to the practice-based element, allowing for interplay between the two. This resulted in three projects that exemplify the speculative design approach applied to robots, inviting dialogue and contemplation on what a preferable robotic future might be