1 week, 2019

Induvidual

What if....

the design of our digital products showed apathy.

Apathy        Noun - lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern.

Explorations

Acting out apathy to get understanding of the feeling.

A physical model that gives a minimal reaction to users input to explore lack of interest in physical movement.

Bringing it into the digital world, what if Google gave an apathic reaction, a minimal reaction.
Do we interpret this as an technical error?

What if a chatbot would read our message but decides to just not answer and go offline.
Do we feel ignored and irratated already?

Alexa, our digital personal assitant, not caring about our questions anymore.

Final exploration, a program that shows apathy towards people that do not fit the criteria hidden and shown in design.

Conclusion

I believe that there are emotions like apathy in the algorithms around us. Some gender classification algorithms only care about being a men or woman for example. Through these explorations I realized that UI of these algorithms can hide this. By showing it as an technical error or a non-option emotions are being hidden. If you show them in a for a human understandable way it becomes visible that algorithms are designed with certain guidelines in mind.