Neural: A fictional future of domestic video surveillance – Swati Srivastava

Design Fiction • Domestic Cameras • 2018

Neural: A fictional future of domestic video surveillance

Neural is an independent exploration of a future design space for domestic video surveillance technology. Advanced home surveillance cameras are capturing and transforming everyday life, into data streams that are readable and interpretable by both humans and machines, while also becoming ubiquitous yet unremarkable features of most urban environments. This is a work of design fiction exploring the plausible evolution of these cameras in the near future and its potential implications. (in collaboration with Sumit Pandey)

Neural: A fictional technology magazine, January 2025 issue

Process
Identifying signals
Extrapolating to the near future
Making the future feel like present

Identifying signals
We started by assembling a broad list of emerging trends and forecasts, recent technological breakthroughs, experimental research, and visions and policies, related to video surveillance technologies, from a range of sources such as news articles, future forecasts, and academic research results. These sources were then translated into short, provocative, and actionable ‘instances’ and collected into an “instance database.”

Extrapolating to the near future

We subsequently extrapolated and brainstormed plausible products and services and the related fictional circumstances and needs in the near future. We followed an arc of continued growth to avoid overly utopian or dystopian narratives.

We chose a magazine format to express this future vision as it allowed multiple aspects and perspectives of the world to be presented within a single overarching narrative. Moreover, this format implicitly incorporates real-world contrasts between the marketing-driven tone of advertisements and the subjective and sceptically optimistic tone of the editorial content.

Based on the extrapolated trends we wrote articles, created print advertisements, featured wish list and technology timeline and a cover page. We created detailed print based infographics and other supporting visuals creating a thorough diegetic prototype presenting a snapshot of the near future.

For instance, we created a hand-drawn data visualisation inspired by the Dear Data project to reflect a journalist’s interaction with a fictional service called Humanizr, that uses different cameras to create datasets that subjectively label different aspects of people’s interactions with one another in different situations, such as care or concern in everyday exchanges.