The Deep Affinity Lab: Playing with the Future of Intelligence
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The proliferation of artificial intelligence provides humanity’s greatest ontological opportunity. As the things we design, design us back, The Deep Affinity Lab proposes that we seize this opportunity by designing our intelligent machines and interfaces with a focus on ecological empathy, understanding, and connectivity.
In this way, climate change and the rise of intelligent machines are not existential threats, but instead solutions to each other. From machine learning helping to decode the language of bats to drones fighting forest fires, a new narrative is already emerging.
Borrowing from the social lab’s movement, the Deep Affinity Lab is a social speculation laboratory setup to evolve this eco-cognitive vision by leveraging the imaginative potential of speculative design through a portfolio of transformational engagements. This portfolio included a series of immersive experiences, workshops, and games to explore how new ecologically intelligent minds - natural, artificial, and hypothetical - could be created.
After building a community of over a hundred people, the lab has developed new design principles for how speculative design can scale and successfully operate more systemically. Join us engage this new vision of artificial intelligence and to hear discussion of the lab’s practice of social speculation. Finally, Jack will lead an interactive workshop in which participants will play version of the Deep Affinity Lab’s game, Future Minds, which lets participants play with the emerging possibilities of new minds.
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Jack Wilkinson
Jack Wilkinson’s practice is rooted in speculation as a means to empower imagination and explore what lies across the posthuman horizon. Leveraging his background in both entertainment and psychology, he seeks to utilize design to create transformative technology to evolve human ontology and find greater empathetic ways of being.
He is a part-time lecturer at the Parsons School of Design, a fellow at the Emerging Future Institute and a frequent collaborator with the Extrapolation Factory. He has worked in the Designed Realities Lab alongside Tony Dunne & Fiona Raby and in the Urban Intelligence Lab alongside Shannon Mattern.
He was invited to Japan as a Global Design Fellow for Toshiba and to Italy where he worked with NeFuLa. He has also worked with and presented projects to IBM, NASA, Microsoft, Cognizant, Idea Couture, Accenture, Bell Labs and the United Nations. A
s the director of the Deep Affinity Lab, his current focus is on the design of intelligent systems, questioning their role in helping to combat climate chaos and speculating on their ability to bridge the communication gap between human and nonhuman. Outside of his work in design, Jack is also an avid traveller, a trained chef and occasionally moonlights as a stand-up comic.
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