Identity Fluidity

Freedom to be and to choose who you are

How the scenario may emerge

There are many reasons why people’s identity could become more fluid. We have been witness to long term cultural battlegrounds around race, gender and sexuality. Although there is a long way to go and the direction is not always correct, it could be argued that progress in some parts of western society has led to increased freedoms in expression and exploration of identity.

If we couple this with emerging trends in migration (which may rapidly expand in a climate crisis), remote working, and gig economies ,we can also see flexibility emerging in how people use their careers, location and nationalities to define who they are.

This ability to choose not only means that people can fulfil a previously suppressed side of themselves, but it means they can experiment to understand a broader foundation of what it means to be them. This pursuit of self-understanding may well be influenced or supported by the emergence of emotional AI that could enhance our self-understanding by bringing us sophisticated insights about our character and patterns in collective identities.

While this fluidity is defined by a relaxation of what it means to be a part of strongly defined demographics, those demographics still demarcate differences in power that mean this freedom will inevitably be less available to some.

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

Find out how we ‘Learned from extreme users’.

What might that mean for Sam?

For someone like Sam, whose identity is constantly being explored, the value of knowing yourself is built through changing yourself. We can explore how services may challenge or meet the needs of ‘fluid people’.

I have to keep friends up to date with who I am so they’re not shocked with my changes… Nothing stays the same.

Advances in medicine could result in increased life expectancy and the extension of sociological or biological phases of life, such as reproductivity. New ways of creating children and alternative types of familial structure may remodel important concepts of identity relating to families, in particular, what it means to be a ‘parent’.

Dimensions of change

Spirituality

Values and beliefs could be strained by a mixture of people’s environment and self-discovery.

Sam has been largely independent since they were 16 years old. They have now found a supportive and caring community among fellow LGBT+ people but they have to schedule and rotate time with friends from different parts of their life. They work as a mechanic with their uncle, they have football friends, work friends from the nightclub, uni friends where they study Physics, and church friends. In each environment, they like to represent slightly differently.

People like Sam are happy when they are free to embody different sides of themselves and whatever they’d like to be. Happiness comes from simple things like a well timed cup of tea — it is a spectrum of different momentary states. While a lot of their happiness comes from being able to have the experiences they want, they still take value from purpose, like the role they take from being a part of a community at church or working with their uncle.

Their goal

Their goal is to understand themselves and be understood by others. They want to create control, purpose, and independence in their life and want to build new connections and relationships based on truly authentic self-expression.

Sam’s happiness is heavily impacted by the freedom they have to create authentic interactions between their true identity and the world around them.

Explorations in ‘Identity fluidity’

We explore the future by looking for potential points of traction between this scenario of identity fluidity and the needs of someone like Sam. 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 ‘Conducted lab explorations’.

Sides of me

A platform that uses AI to monitor your emotions and behaviours, so you understand all the different sides of your character. It shows you how your character is related to people in different contexts and how you’re perceived by others.

Team: The Lab

Non-Dinary is an educational dining experience focused on the notion of gender as a construct. Non-Dinary approaches this conversation in an unconventional and lighthearted way to create a transformational journey for uninformed cisgender people to develop a greater understanding of gender non-conformity.The service also captures the level of comprehension about the wider spectrum of gender, the changes in gender acceptance geographically and over time and to better understand learning patterns to raise institutional awareness.

Team:
Francesco Cagnola
Kiran Dulay
Kun Qian
Luwen Zhang
Saumya Singhal
Yue Yu

Emerging topics

In this set of explorations, we were asked to consider scenarios where huge advances in AI mean that people may be understood by digital services better than they can themselves. Consistent data inputs about our emotional state and our actions can be cross referenced to give people new levels of insight that simply would not be achievable without regular monitoring and algorithmic analysis.

Within these visions, we can anticipate issues with how technology can define a person’s identity in a neutral, meaningful and nuanced way. For example, if there were issues in our algorithms, the mirror they hold up to people may be inaccurate but unquestioned, which could potentially result in a multitude of side effects. As another example – if someone experiences something challenging in their life, an algorithm may confuse that as an entirely negative situation, and discourage them from continuing with it. In such a circumstance, people might rarely leave their comfort zones and the technology could corrupt someone’s understanding of themselves and alter their chosen course in life.

Beyond the conversation about AI led human understanding, we may also see the proliferation of services which respond to the adaptations of people’s identity. This may simply be provision of service in neutral ways or highly nuanced ways or they may blend a standard offering with a political and social message. They may go beyond services that consider and accommodate more fluid states of identity toward actively encouraging new levels of comprehension around a particular topic.

When viewed collectively, these explorations remind us that while technology may enhance some new found identity freedoms within ourselves, they will always exist in a complex world where other individuals and organisations have their own political agendas that may become increasingly vocal and perhaps not so fluid.

Related to ‘Identity Fluidity’

Propositions

Mymes

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

Developing a deeper AI driven understanding of yourself to influence your decisions and optimise for your happiness and prosperity.

Propositions

Edit

Edit is a lifestyle service that helps you edit things in and out of your life through enriched tracking and mini-experiments.

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.

Identity

Self-identity is challenged, open for exploration and the building of character

The forces acting on ‘Identity’ in the future

Among the many forces potentially influencing identity in the future, we highlight three areas:

The convergence of global issues and rapid developments in technology could mean that our capabilities as humans are remodelled at increasing rates, our everyday lives may be reshaped with limited consent and challenge our models of personal identity.
There may be more freedom for people to explore themselves. Not only in the sense that society may allow more freedom in career, sexuality, age, gender and geographic or social ‘belonging’, but also in the sense that society is increasingly tolerant of fluidity. In other words, it is not simply that you can be what you want to be, you are now also able to change what you want to be.
While these first and second areas describe growing flux and growing freedom, the third area is about capacity. Increased interest in ourselves coupled with deeper AI learning could lead to heightened understanding and subsequent malleability of ourselves, our psychology and our identity.

With these potential forces acting on people’s identity, we explore two hypothetical scenarios:

Altered Parenthood
Identity Fluidity

These Future Scenarios are composed of a future context that is based on the trend analysis and a concept of a future person whose extreme experience of Identity has a large bearing on their happiness. For these future people, we predict needs, desires and future pain points in relation to their future context and use this as a basis for the ideation of provocative future concepts that solve some of the needs of the future person.

Altered Parenthood

Service visions

Genesis

Genesis offers soon to be parents more choice than ever. Choose when and how to grow your child – No need for eggs, sperm or a womb…

Find out how we ‘Explored the future landscape with the project client’.

Identity Fluidity

Identity could grow more fluid as people gain more freedom to pursue the lifestyles of their choosing outside normative assumptions of race, nationality, sexuality, gender, age and more. More nuanced characteristics are supported by social media niches alongside AI that may raise self awareness to help you define what works for you.

Non-Dinary

Non Dinary is an educational dining experience focused on the notion of gender as a construct. Non Dinary approaches this conversation…

Find out how we ‘Prioritised societal dimensions related to health and happiness’.

Identity Fluidity

Freedom to be and to choose who you are

How the scenario could unfold

Due to an increased pace of change, people may generally be required to continue developing new skills and knowledge to survive in the workplace. Compounded by an increased lifespan and a strain on state pension schemes in some countries, people may need to work until they are older, requiring more adaptability not just in skills and knowledge but in career choice.

If we consider that having children can put strain on careers that already require constant adaptation and that within this context people have an increased biological freedom on when to have children — it is possible that people may rather delay parenthood for a period when they are financially able to step away from work for longer in order to reduce its financial risk. Alternatively, this potential need for security may conflate with other emerging shifts in relationship and community structures to mean that people form new familial contracts and new forms of parenthood.

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

Find out how we ‘Learned from extreme users’.

What might that mean for Amma?

For someone like Amma, whose identity is closely tied to concepts of parenthood, we can explore how services may evolve, which may support or challenge her needs in the future.

I have to keep friends up to date with who I am so they’re not shocked with my changes… Nothing stays the same.

Over the last two decades Amma has taken great fulfilment from evolving and curating her career as a coach. Now, with her friends surrounding her, she is starting to shape her life toward having a child in 20 years time. Nothing seems as important as leaving a positive legacy on the world by bringing a new person into it to impart everything she has learnt and to nurture her child in a loving, dependable community. She made the decision to freeze eggs a long time ago and loves that she consequently has the capacity to phase her life, rather than do everything at once.

Her goal:

Her goal is to be as prepared as possible to be a parent. To prepare her body, to have the right resources, knowledge and network and to generally create the space to have a child in her career break.

Amma’s happiness is directly connected to her dream of being a mother.

Explorations in ‘Altered parenthood’

We explore the future by looking for potential points of friction (in concepts of identity) between this scenario of parenthood and the needs of someone like Amma. 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.

What beneficial elements of these services could be fostered?
What is already happening in some way?
What harm may these services do? What might prevent services such as these proliferating?
What cultures may develop around a landscape of services such as this?

Find out how we ‘Conducted lab explorations’.

Genesis

Genesis offers soon to be parents more choice than ever.
Choose when and how to grow your child – No need for eggs, sperm or a womb. Genesis forms your child however you’d like while also using gene curation to balance characteristics and avoid health issues.

Team: The Lab

An all inclusive support and preparation service offering savings plans based on the age you are planning to retire and number of children you are planning to have with oocyte cryopreservation linked to your savings plans. Alongside financial support are classes to prepare your body, tuition on how to raise and empathise with your child and ‘family preparation’ – the set up and adaptation of relationships to build complimentary surrogates, parents, siblings and friends for your child.

Team: The Lab

Find out how we ‘Crafted future service concepts’.

Service Visions

Colo

Colo is a personal assistant for self employed people who work at home by helping them find someone to work with who shares similar interests and lives nearby and by helping you build a working routine.

Emerging topics

In this set of explorations, we were asked to consider scenarios where huge advancements in reproductive science and general health improvements may impact the way people organise and structure their lives around child-rearing and we extrapolate services that respond to those scenarios.

We can envisage a slow emergence of human capacity to genetically adapt or design traits and characteristic elements in one’s children and the vastly complex implications that may have on society. Questions emerge around ‘parenthood’ and ‘responsibility’ if a parent’s role spreads beyond ‘nurture’ and hereditary ‘nature’, toward being the ‘designer’. We can ask who should have the right to engineer and how? How will our understanding of identity alter should people’s character be genetically styled by another?

As we look at the convergence of less provocative trends such as the ageing of populations, the fluidity of relationships and an increased reproductive freedom; we can propose outcomes where child rearing becomes an even more orchestrated activity, perhaps planned over decades in order to meet new perceptions of optimum parenting conditions. These circumstances may lead to new familial networks where distinct roles are established around what value can be brought to the family unit. In addition, this may, more simply, lead to increased age gaps between parent and child, altering their relationships, the children’s learned behaviour and the ways they may depend on each other at different stages of their lives.

Related to ‘Identity Fluidity’

Propositions

Mymes

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

Developing a deeper AI driven understanding of yourself to influence your decisions and optimise for your happiness and prosperity.

Propositions

Edit

Edit is a lifestyle service that helps you edit things in and out of your life through enriched tracking and mini-experiments.

Theme: Identity

Identity Fluidity

Freedom to be and to choose who you are

How the scenario may emerge

What might that mean for Sam?

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Scenarios