It’s Time to Relax: The Critical Importance of Digital Mental Health Products in the Context of Surveillance Capitalism

There has been a huge increase in the use of digital technology throughout healthcare in recent years, with everything from apps to wearable tech. The mental health and wellbeing sector has been no exception. There are a wide variety of digital mental health apps available directly from app stores, making therapeutic techniques accessible for every smartphone user. The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing quarantines and lockdowns, followed by the current economic recession, have redefined the tech world's agenda. There has been an increased emphasis on mental wellbeing. Many of the well-known tech companies, whose core business is not even related to healthcare (such as Facebook, Telefonica, or Google) have invested in mental wellbeing, either through “moonshots” or by introducing new product segments. For their critics, this is a “do-good” gesture intended to detract attention from their data extraction processes. This leads us to question, what is it that these companies want to recommend to people through the use of mental wellbeing tech? What is the new set of values that they are promoting? In this article we critically analyse digital mental health products. We discuss how they might become a political tool, speculate on their side effects, and investigate outcomes of their increasing popularity. We want to move beyond the personal data privacy debate and tackle other potential issues – what does this data sharing mean in terms of a shift in collective psychology and ideologies? What is the potential for them to become political tools? Is this a step towards human and non-human convergence?

Between Dissent and Consensus, Resistance and Counter-Resistance: Design Practice as a Common Project-Process for Plural Possibilities of Being and Becoming

This paper is a contribution to the discussion on the ethical and political limitations of institutionalised, dominant design practices and on the need to rethink the ways in which they operate. It points out that institutionalised design processes act as a dispositive of power that not only capture and colonise forms of life, but that also shape territories, bodies and languages through normative models that are exogenous to them. This discussion is crucial when thinking about the role that design has played in nurturing current crises. This paper is an inquiry into the possibility of design practice that is not institutionalised either by sovereign designing designers or by subordinated designed users, but that constitutes itself according to dynamics where design emerges as a common project-process of creative possibilities of being and becoming. Crucial aspects for a non-institutionalised design practice are identified through the analysis of a design experience with communities in Rio de Janeiro favelas. This paper shows how this design experience is based on a design approach that, through discursive structures, dynamically supports and is informed by dissent and consensus, and by the interplay between resistance and counter-resistance.

The Digital Sublime: Orientation Strategies for a Vertiginous World

This article addresses the increasing levels of complexity and abstraction that digital technologies produce, which generate a feeling of amazement nowadays similar to what the philosophy of art and aesthetics deemed the experience of the sublime. Through the idea of the “digital sublime”, we aim to find ways to find direction in this vertiginous world. Our intention is to research the extent to which art and design can function as mediators of scales that translate the digital sublime into concrete images that are more digestible, as well as easy to understand and perceive. We believe this is one of the challenges that these disciplines must face in our era governed by extra-human scales, both technological (the cloud, artificial intelligence, 5G, etc.) and geological (the Anthropocene and global climate change). With this in mind, we will analyse the work of several artists whose careers reflect their commitment to these issues. If we, and our bodies, are constantly translated into data, can art and design reverse meaning and make our data transform into bodies in such a way as to produce an aesthetic (sensible) experience of them? Can this help us to understand digital infrastructure and its materiality in a more intuitive and approachable way so that a body can imagine and/or visualise it? Can these actions encourage the production of collective emancipation strategies that allow us to be active agents when reconfiguring the governance and algorithmic regulations imposed on us?

Harnessing Conflict: Antagonism and Spatiotemporal Design Practices

This paper explores the capacities of design to interrogate the socio-spatial context in order to foreground conflict, dissent and dispute as creative practices to fuel urban transformation. In today’s urban habitat, spaces and actions do not mesh seamlessly. The city is characterised by a disjunction between the physicality of the urban fabric as a materialisation of ideologies and the relationality of contested supremacies and entropic dynamics that inhabit it. Consequently, the practices of contemporary transformative city-making need to be reinvented through temporality and impermanence, accounting for disorder and embracing instability. In that sense, antagonism is a key element to harness in critical design practices aimed at promoting urban diversity. In this paper we study how incorporating antagonism in design practices can trigger processes of urban reformulation by constituting liminal spaces of opportunity where democratisation emerges as a spatiotemporal practice. Two related case studies carried out in 2020 in the Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona (Subjective Cartographies: A Mirror of Diversity and Infrastructures for Public Space Interaction), are presented to explore how design can support dissidence and plurality, whether through identification and visualisation or by catalysing them as situated practices of active citizenship. In both case studies, design fosters de-hierarchisation and trans-linearity in the city, reclaiming the right to direct action in collective urban spaces. In this sense, this paper explores how design contributes to activating multiple processes of emancipated citizenship, harnessing conflict and constructive dissent as situated spatiotemporal practices to promote diversity. Facilitating the proliferation of counter-hegemonic notions of cosmopolitics, territory, domesticity and publicness, the design practices revisited in this paper operate between politics, space and affect in order to promote intersubjective relations in public spaces, using the material, temporal and affective dimensions of design to co-create diverse and resilient urban habitats.

Co-Designing Meaningful Dialogues on Sexual Harassment

We live in a dysfunctional world led by white-male dominated, patriarchal and capitalist societies that perpetuate continuous oppression. The public space is culturally perceived as a man’s world while women have been traditionally confined to the private one. Because claiming a safe public space for all is a political act, I want to actively cultivate a creative experience that facilitates dialogue, ideation and agency for self-identified women to reclaim their right to exist safely in it. My paper will focus on this creative experience, as a collective resistance, that started in Gainesville, FL at the Civic Media Center and has now become an ongoing, online and worldwide endeavour.

Green Military New Deal

Among the most decisive challenges that the climate crisis will bring during up coming decades will be the necessity to overcome the current lack of planetary ecosystem governance. The void that exists where proper geopolitics should reside demands a recalibration of the focus of design towards the conception, implementation, and support of new institutional models capable of reconfiguring established infrastructural, ecosystem and governance structures. The rising awareness of the lack of ecological agency has recently led to the emergence of several proto-policies branded under the name of “Green New Deals” (GNDs): the green proposals across the world that aim to address climate change and economic inequality. However, the implementation of the GND’s goals requires not only the necessary infrastructural means for decarbonisation but also a set of social insurance mechanisms able to guarantee social stability during the transition to a new energy regime. The complexity that this task poses in relation to society, the economy, manufacturing industries and goods and information logistics will require the establishment of an institution capable of intervening in the regulation and coordination of all the parties involved. Green Military New Deal (GMND) is a research proposal that lies between the legislative models of ecosystem governance and the institutions capable of enforcing them. It speculates about the military establishment as a proto-platform that could fulfil the institutional gap created by the GND’s demands. Would it be possible to reimagine the military establishment as a trans-national ecological force capable of mobilising and enforcing proper ecosystem management, conscious of its ability to act as a welfare provider while deploying its technological resources? Our research offers an informed approach toward this counterintuitive premise, uncomfortable as it may be, by forcing us to question how certain existing institutions could be properly repurposed to address issues of global necessity.

Invisible Conflicts: The Challenges of Design on a Planetary Scale

The experience of the interconnected planet is the experience of an artificial totality, the result of the accelerated intersection of different invisible realms, topologies and layers that compete with one another following the irregular logics of rival interests, incompatible designs, non-human life form habits and rhythms, forms of resistance, errors, collateral effects and accidents. This issue of Temes de Disseny presents case studies and research practices that address the need to focus on these frictions from a variety of different perspectives in order to detect new forms of power and hidden inequalities as well as to envision unprecedented opportunities for intervention and counter-design.

This Person Does Exist

This Person Does Exist is an artistic approach to exploring a large dataset of photographic portraits in a randomised manner. The dataset was originally created by Nvidia Research Lab, which has scraped and analysed creative commons images from the popular image hosting platform Flickr. These pictures were then used to train a machine learning model which can create new stochastic images of faces. In contrast to a popular website that showcases the computer generated images, I am displaying random faces from the dataset with their corresponding metadata. This essay looks into extractivist mechanisms in current machine learning techniques, using the internet to populate and refine databases, while focusing on artistic approaches that expose them. I make the case for Dataset Art as an emerging field which reframes scientific corpora by placing them into galleries and exhibiting them as found objects online. Finally, I argue that this artistic practice is a legitimate way of opening up a larger public discourse, although artists working with human data must be aware of ethical issues and responsibilities regarding privacy and consent.

Disappearing Bodies, Disappearing Objects: What Years and Years Can Teach Us About Design

British television has recently acquired a reputation for producing challenging dystopian visions of the future. While Black Mirror casts a disenchanted look on our experiences, Years and Years lacks cynicism and, in that regard, holds interesting lessons for designers. While the issues commented on by the British fictional series are also global in scale and scope (nuclear bombing, political tensions in the EU, energy crisis), the series displays a rare creativity in its depiction of future objects and innovations. The inventions depicted can be truly groundbreaking, long awaited or dysfunctional. While the series examines these objects and dispositifs, it never leans towards a set position, be it discouraged Luddism or happy-go-lucky celebration. Because it refuses to embrace or reject technology, it gives space to a rich examination of the possible design products of the future. This essay examines three selected objects (a meal tray, a vocal AI and a drone) which potentially condense a great deal of the current criticism of technology. None of the analysed objects are incredible in form or function; in fact, they have all been the subject of previous fiction matter. These objects will be analysed in terms of dispositifs and usage, but also as temporal devices whose functionality and aesthetics change with or against the tide. The concept of disappearance will be key as all three objects purport to replace jobs and the workers who hold such positions. These technological products all enact an erasure of work and of the working-class body, if they are understood as potential products available in a near future. As narrative devices, however, they also function as potent critical agents, underlying potential modes of resistance in our present.

A.I.R.: From Radical Individuality to Connected Subjectivity

Humans are part of an interlinked world crossed by overlapping flows: substances, beings and information. The major global events that have unfolded throughout 2020 have profoundly altered the social system, revealing deep structural weak spots, and pushed its resilience to the limit, nearly causing its suffocation. This context has called into question our anthropocentric mindset and has led us to critically revise how we think about the (eco)systems we are part of, how we act within them, what is our agency to drive meaningful shifts, and with which tools we can do so. For nine months during which life and art became part of a single space, we, three artists and designers in collaboration with a diverse team of researchers, explored the way in which our individual and collective agency is affected by how close – both emotionally and physically – we feel to others, whether human or not. By navigating through art and design approaches, we imagined perspectives to defy our dualist, linear and Cartesian point of view to question how, as our system regains its speed, we can move towards a more connected sense of being. A systemic thinking toolkit, dozens of conversations, a breathing body, a poem and a visual essay have unfolded during this time, giving shape to the project A.I.R. Air[noun, uncountable], the mixture of gases we breathe; air[noun, uncountable], the space that circulates everything; but also A.I.R., an acronym for “artists in residency”, or more accurately, artists in remoteness. Air that we have lacked too often during these nine months. Air that can be the deepest kind of embrace, in these times pierced by radical forms of isolation. We start weaving our ideas around the notions of systems, agency and closeness by asking: how close do you feel?