For my final project I plan to continue my bus stop collection project.
One of my initial motivations for this work was that I believe that physical objects can be useful in grounding conversations around an intangible or invisible subject (such as algorithms and machine learning in this case) and for bringing questions into a tangible form. I hope to focus on this aspect for my final project. So for the further development of this project, I plan to design a piece that could be a standalone installation or held as a workshop. Below is a diagram of the setup (please excuse the scratch paper!):
Each marker card when looked at through a phone will show a 3D model of a bus stop in augmented reality (that I will model using Oculus Medium based on the output from the GAN). There will be a prompt card in front of it asking the viewer to think and speculate about elements of its design such as: Who is it designed for? Who was it designed by? Where is it located? What is it optimizing for? On the back of the card will be the actual parameters (dataset, etc). There will be another card (or maybe this is all one foldout card?) with a reflection which could be more questions or an explanation of the design process. I will aim to make three models in total (in a more finalized version I would like to have closer to five). In a workshop setting this could be done in groups and conclude with a share-back.
This approach is also inspired by Design Fiction methods (as described by Stead et al in Spimes Not Things. Creating A Design Manifesto For a Sustainable Internet of Things) - a similar school of thought to Critical Design and Speculative Design, but meant for public and participatory settings through media rather than fine art galleries and museums.
I hope that this could also be an exercise towards rethinking design systems and what kinds of human-machine tools would be possible in this area with new developments such as machine learning - as said by Laura Kay Devendorf, a creative expansion.