Sliding Doors: Protopian Engagements with Art Prototypes on the Future of Work

Technology innovation requires inspiration and imagination, and we investigate how engagement with art prototypes utilizing digital technologies can be productive for people in taking actions towards their desired futures of work. Reporting from a Research Art Exploratory event open to the public where professional artists displayed three art prototypes embedding different visions about the future of work, we present empirical data demonstrating how participants engaged or disengaged with the art prototypes, and characterize the qualities of these engagements. We complement existing HCI research by proposing protopian engagement as descriptive of the qualities which make engagements with art prototypes effective. Protopian engagements emphasize the possible intentional incremental progress toward an identified desirable future. We discover three dimensions which determined whether protopian engagements with art prototypes can be achieved: namely perplexity, plausibility, and hope. We extend current HCI research on utopias, complementing existing approaches with protopian engagements.