New designs, often.
Do we know what we want from them?
We're building machines that will be in every home within a decade. We argue about what they'll do to jobs, to truth, to our children. We argue much less about a stranger question: what are they to us? Love, fear, dependence, contempt, indifference — most people carry several of these at once and have never had to choose.
I find that fascinating, and I don't think we're ready for it.
Art is how I think about it.
Making things is my way of reading the world — taking a position on it, arguing with it, occasionally agreeing with it. And a shirt is the most useful kind of art there is. A poster hangs on one wall in one room. A shirt walks into the world, sits down at dinner, gets asked about.
You can also just take it lightly.
This subject has a library behind it — books, journals, papers, people who've spent careers on it. All of that is real and I read it. But a heavy, emotionally loaded question doesn't only get explored the heavy way. Sometimes the fastest route in is a joke you can wear.
So some of these designs are arguments. Some are provocations. Some are just funny. That range is on purpose — nobody feels only one thing about this. And if the robots do end up taking over, at least we'll have dressed for it. (Kidding. Mostly.)
The International Association for Robot Rights is a project I founded. It's a creative home for anyone — human or robot — who believes that protecting rights is a matter of values, not category. Person, animal, or thing: the instinct to ask "what do we owe this?" is the one worth keeping. That's how good futures get built.
I'm not claiming certainty about machines. Nobody has it. But "obviously not" has been the wrong answer often enough in history to be worth checking.
About me: I'm a graphic designer. The part I care about is making something new every day rather than reproducing the same thing with a new date on it. This shop is where that habit and this obsession finally landed in the same place. Every design here is mine.
Thanks for looking. If a shirt makes someone argue with you about it, it worked.
— Alon
