Sidelined and connected communities

Digitally enhanced community cohesion and power

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we consider the potential for emerging trends in technology that may influence relationships

We project that existing trends of social isolation among the elderly may progress further into the future. We suggest that as life expectancy extends and work becomes more global, families may disperse and the elderly may be less supported. In this context, an already vulnerable demographic of society may become even more neglected and witness a deterioration of services that can accommodate their needs. Whether it’s transport, retail or entertainment, elderly people may feel like their communities are shrinking and that they are becoming less able or welcome to engage in society the way they’d like to.

We also propose that as national institutions defile public trust, alternative means of taking action in the world may prosper. We consider that online collectives may become a more powerful means of organising around common interests and specific grievances. These collectives may gain in sophistication in the way they grow and how they amass evidence toward their cause. We may see platforms emerge that use concepts such as clicktivism, crowdfunding and social media mobilisation to advance their methodologies and have impact on the world around them.

We consider the significance of this context from the perspective of a future character who we create based on our research with real people.

What might that mean for Sandra?

For someone like Sandra, whose friendships are reducing and who feels neglected by society, meaningful connections with anybody can bring a little joy. We can explore how services may challenge or meet the needs of people who feel sidelined.

I feel good knowing my daughter’s family is ok… every time the phone rings I wish it was him. Sometimes I hear the phone ringing even when it’s not.

Sandra lives in a three-bedroom house with two cats. Her daughter lives in Finland and her husband passed away fourteen years ago. She spends most of her time sitting and watching documentaries because she has a weak hip but she sometimes takes her scooter to the community centre to see other people and talk about what’s going on around town or share old stories. Although she enjoys going out, she increasingly feels like she’s unwelcome in town – it feels as though she gets in the way. She has been to three funerals for friends in the last 18 months. Her biggest fear is having a serious health problem that will cost more than she can afford.

Happiness for Margaret is knowing that her daughter and grandsons are healthy and happy and she talks to them whenever she gets the chance. She always enjoys seeing her friends to relive fond memories but worries when she has not heard from them for a while.

Her goals

Sandra’s goals are to keep finding meaningful companionship and to be as much a part of her family’s life as possible.

Sandra’s happiness is dependent on her ability to feel connected and relevant to the world through the relationships she has in it.

Explorations in ‘Sidelined and connected communities’

We explore the future by looking for potential points of traction between this scenario of sidelined and connected communities and the needs of someone like Sandra. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or as spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

Find out how we ‘created the framework for future thinking’.

Dignifight

Dignifight is a union style platform for organising activism for the elderly to reshape society so it accommodates them fairly. The platform provides activism tools and events that proactively enable the elderly to fight for their right to be respected in society.

Microaggression recording wearables track and monitor the lived experience of age discrimination to build evidence and their media machine communicates their fight with headlines such as ‘46% age pay gap for the elderly’.
The platform also offers partnerships with Re-training Schools, Universities and recruitment agencies designed specifically for the elderly to help them come out of retirement if they want to.

Team: The Lab

It learns people’s preferences, and forms safe events around people’s common interests and provides activities and conversation starters that are appropriate to each group in order to connect people together across all demographics.
Once connected people grow their online network of friends so they can see what people are doing and evolve their own social groups.

Team: The Lab

Emerging topics

In this set of explorations, we are asked to consider two ways in which disconnected and sidelined communities can reclaim their own power and connection to one another and to society. One that uses a union style strategy to bring together activists and organise in highly sophisticated ways and the second strategy that uses technology to match individuals with groups and facilitate new communities.

The first area of exploration uses sophisticated algorithms to get to know individuals that are isolated and then using that information it matches people to each other and initiates events and conversations to help transition people from isolated, anxious and perhaps vulnerable positions into more resilient communities. From this exploration, we can ask what it may mean to have communities facilitated by algorithms. Might it bring together new types of people that would otherwise not have connected? could that promote tolerance and acceptance or division? If all communities have their own identities – do algorithmically created groups and friends have a unique style? Do these communities need to be maintained by AI as well as initiated by them and if so does that mean the quality of the relationships is lesser?

While these questions are based on the full unfolding of the concept, and while the concept still represents a potentially exciting way to reduce isolation, the explorations take the discussion around technologically enabled relationships up to a ‘community’ level where we can begin to explore how algorithms could intervene in fruitful or damaging ways having macro side-effects.

The second area of exploration revolves around the concept of activism and proposes a union style model that mobilises disempowered communities to act in organised ways to reach their goal. Protest may be a traditional means of making change but it’s organisation may become increasingly sophisticated. The internet could bring people together around common causes, wearables could help to portray people’s plight, social media can carry their message and their direct actions can be designed and organised to the greatest effect by platforms dealing solely in fighting injustice. What this represents is a potential emergence of services that build on clicktivism, crowdfunding and social media mobilisation by adopting new technologies and coordinating in new ways that bring more voice to people’s needs.

This particular exploration also raises topics around what an age inclusive society might mean and what impact societal relationships may have on people’s happiness. The inclusion of emotion sensing wearables as a weapon in the activists arsenal to document microaggressions not only translates the damage caused by inequality to the broader public but it also demonstrates the impact of transient, micro-relationships on people’s happiness. We may be able to quantify the true impact of the interactions we have as we pass on the streets and in the shops.

These explorations discuss our relationships at the community or societal level and introduce discussions around the role of technology in initiating community and potentially highlighting the impact of unhealthy societal tensions.

Related to ‘Sidelined and connected communities’

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.

Propositions

Yolt

Yolt is a community building app that orchestrates group meetings online and offline by matching people based on the potential quality of a conversation not simply based on being similarly minded.

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Sidelined and connected communities

Digitally enhanced community cohesion and power

What is the problem

Yolt responds to the potential increase of the already dire condition of social isolation in the UK, particularly amongst the elderly. It also simultaneously responds to divisions in society brought about by populism and social media bubbles.

In terms of social isolation, people describe feeling less capable of forming new connections to each other. We can foresee that UK society may grow further toward being fundamentally geared for younger generations, regardless of the ageing of the general population. A reduction of welfare coupled with this societal inaccessibility could leave increasing numbers of elderly people further isolated, leading to poorer health, diminished community and further unhappiness.

longside this projection, we speculate that another trend may continue. We propose that due to the ‘bubble effects’ of social media and a potential growth in populist politicians, people may have more polarised views and less willingness to listen and be open to other people’s perspectives. In this scenario, we could see communities disintegrate further, with people feeling increasingly isolated, and public consensus and camaraderie becoming less and less possible.

How ‘Yolt’ responds

Yolt offers anybody who would value an increased sense of community the ability to connect with people who share the same need. It connects people based on opportunities that Yolt perceives as being potential spaces for healthy and meaningful conversation. These conversations are curated and guided by the context (i.e. the space) and group dynamics of the people it aims to bring together (people’s interests, the number of people, previous experiences with Yolt) and by the conversation starters and conversation curation that it offers to the dynamic between people. Yolt connects people that may otherwise have considered each other to be incompatible, thus expanding people’s perception of their own ability to access a community, companionship or even common ground.

Quickly helps you meet people:
Yolt shows you people in the area who are interested in topics that might interest you offering you an easy way to get involved straight away.

Stimulates conversation about important topics:
When you share topics on your profile that interest you, Yolt links you to other people who have related and diverse thinking and initiates conversation instantly.

Matches you with people you should know:
Yolt gradually learns about who you really are through AI powered personality assessments and matches you with people you would get along with, and with people who it is important to get along with.

Find out how we did a ‘backcasting of the value propositions’.

What we
learnt

We demonstrated a low fidelity prototype of Yolt to high-need users and this is what we learned:

The discussion that emerges around this proposition focuses mainly on the plausibility of being able to create digital tools that in turn create a positive dynamic and culture between people who may not have the same views.
Although our participants hoped t it could be possible, they expressed that it would be immensely powerful and could reshape people’s perspectives of society, reducing isolation and division.
As a broader issue, a larger set of questions emerged around what it might mean for our communities and our relationships if technology begins to have more sway in orchestrating them.

The main area of discussion arising from this concept was about the issues foreseen in its implementation. Most people felt sceptical that a service could create the right kind of culture where people didn’t interpret disagreement as conflict. People felt that although the app’s mechanisms to bring people together were really exciting, the idea of connecting people based on differences of opinion could be problematic, and that doing so in a group setting would be really challenging as group dynamics are often more intimidating for people. While the proposition makes allowances for this by learning about people before,during and after their interactions with other people, this would nonetheless be the biggest issue.

People were positive about the ideology of bringing people together in an environment where disagreements could be voiced and listened to. But everyone felt that they had not been heard and that others wouldn’t listen to them, with many people openly describing political correctness as being a confusing, inaccessible, judgmental and isolating force. It is clear that for a proposition like this to work, the principles of those services would have to be ingrained and upheld in as much user behaviour as possible.

In essence, the perception is that it would be overwhelmingly difficult to orchestrate an online or offline culture that would prevent users’ interactions from becoming conflicting and would likely create conflict and unpleasant experiences.

Tech changes culture

The counterargument to this claim is that the culture of existing, purely digital, social media platforms have created a climate that heightens the more combative elements of our, very natural human behaviours. If these environments are capable of influencing our interactive habits in this way, then surely this is evidence that, with the right design, they can indeed be redirected toward more constructive cultures.

Potential inauthenticity and distortion

Another discussion point around this proposition looks at it assuming that it can do exactly what it describes —bring people together and curate conversation that enables people to feel listened to and understood, even if not agreed with, and in this point we assume that this effective proposition would be adopted on a large scale – within this parameter we ask questions about the possibility of distorted public opinion and inauthenticity.

As with other propositions of this nature, there is nothing decidedly new about the idea of technology coordinating interactions between people, but what it alludes to is another more concerning progression —if large parts of our communities are brought together based on algorithms, and even those interactions and conversations are orchestrated based on algorithm design —we may be creating conditions for larger scale distortion of our ways of interacting. In turn, we may begin to question the authenticity of the interactions we have with other people. The question is, if a singular (albeit sophisticated) algorithm should flourish as a means of arranging our interactions, particularly around societal topics, could this be corrupted or have other effects of a similar calibre of existing social media (which often break down discussion)?

Find out how we ‘Discussed the implications of the prototypes’.

Propositions

Eros

Eros is essentially a romantic relationship coach and assistant, wrapped into the convenience of an app.

Propositions

Empath

Empath assesses and builds student’s social intelligence and empathy for other people through in-school, personalised, immersive story-telling.

Our new direction of exploration

If this proposition is taken further, the strategic question of relevance to our investigations is more along the lines of:

How might we create online and offline social platforms that orchestrate preferred interpersonal dynamics and culture?