Y X Prize - Z Tells the Story!
Zenia Tata from XPrize India really livened up the show at Tie Leapfrog event last week by getting the techies from Bangalore to present stories about the future. It was something different from the usual tech conference and worth looking into as a tool for creating ventures that can aim for XPrize.
Teams had been through a workshop to Set up (Imagine) a World, Create (Identify) a Problem and Define a Successful Outcome (Solve the problem). Zenia explained that Xprize encourages ventures to use science fiction (eg. Tricorder from Star Wars) as inspiration and prefers those that tackle social problems in India.
First team created a world where the only that mattered was Time, the main character was Samay trying to find more time for himself. Using instruments similar to financial transactions, he becomes the 'richest' person alive. Then, he finds that having all the time is not meaningful.
Next team came up with a love story set in 2047, the protagonist is an AI researcher called Aarti. She creates an AI being that becomes her BAIF (best AI friend ;-) and then she falls in love with the being.
Last team came up with a product based story, somehow I cannot recall its plot. All I remember was that the end was somehow dystopian.
Curiously, all the stories had a few things in common:
- People were trying to bring in Fiction into Science, it might have worked better the other way around.
- Main character was always a technologist or scientist tackling a problem in the future that arises due to technology.
- Dsytopian ending to stories, each time the protagonist ended up solving the problem with technology but not addressing the human need.
Maybe we need to step outside our bubble and connect with people other than techies to understand human needs and be more positive about potential impact of technology!
Am so glad that Zenia did this experiment on stage, it brought out the creativity amongst techies in Bangalore. More such experiments done regularly might soon bring us an Xprize winner that makes impact on society.
What do you think? Should we do such storytelling experiments? Is creativity important for technological progress?
Y if you want to win X from Z :-)