Week 10 Session: Design the dystopia

This week’s question: the fridge now watches its own contents, and you — who is that inventory really for?

Inherited from week 9: the fridge sells reassurance. This week is about what it has begun taking in exchange.

Before the session#

Read the Zuboff excerpts on the smart home.

Then list three inferences a vendor could draw from a fridge inventory that are not about food. Do this before Wednesday rather than during — people find it more unsettling when they arrive at it alone.

In the session#

The exercise is adversarial by design. Building the bad thing is a faster route to understanding it than critiquing it from outside, and it is much harder to be fooled later by a feature you have already designed yourself.

• Design the dystopia (40 min). In groups of four, specify Smart Fridge 2.0, optimised for extraction rather than for the household. At least four features. Previous years have produced: locking high-calorie compartments based on heart-rate data; pushing weight-loss advertising after a late-night opening; auto-ordering with a supplier who paid for placement; sharing consumption data with a health insurer at renewal; and a “family wellness dashboard” that reports one household member’s eating to another.

  For each feature, specify what it measures, what it infers, who receives the data, and what the business model is. A dystopia with no revenue model is not finished.

• Pitching (20 min). Each group pitches sincerely, in the register of a real product launch. The register matters — the discomfort of hearing it pitched well is the exercise.

• Deconstruction (30 min). Now take them apart:

  • Which of your inventions already exist? Usually about half, which is the moment the room goes quiet.
  • Which would be legal in your jurisdiction today?
  • Which would a household actually accept, if it were bundled with something genuinely useful?
  • Zuboff’s frame: where is the behavioural surplus, and where is the lure?
  • Where is the health discipline — the point at which the appliance stops informing and starts governing?

Afterwards#

The Final Project is open and due Friday 28 May. Today’s exercise is its inverse: you have just built the maximally exploitative version, so you now know precisely what a counter-design has to refuse.

Speculative is allowed. Buildable is allowed. A reasoned refusal to build anything is allowed, if you argue for it.