Undermine_through_design

This is my graduation project from the MFA Interaction Design at the Umeå Institute of Design. The project was based on my vision that the art of interaction design is failing to serve humans. We, humans, are becoming the product to be consumed by our technologies. Creating overconsumption and addiction. However, I believe that good interaction design can also be the remedy to this issue created by it. Celebrating fluidity, creating interactions that trigger reflection, empower people, and create sustainable behavior. This project is exploring ways of reaching this goal through an experimental approach.

Details

Vision

- "What if digital design did something else than creating sticky stuff?" -

The focus of this thesis is to intervene at the touchepoint between companies and users. This in order to influence the whole system.

The focus group are people interested in the challenges around digital wellbeing. In particulair the people that can influence how digital design manifests in our society.

Are we more aware of our behaviour when it is reflected by the space around us? Using our physical surroundings to create friction in our engagements with the digital.

What if we had to live with a single frame of our feed for 24h? By changing the update rate do we value our content more? Do content makers become artist exhibiting in peoples houses? Who deciedes which content is shown, us or an algorithm? By altering the update rate we might revalue our content, this to counter our disposable mindset we have towards our data.

How could an offboarding experience with your data look like? Are we aware of the amount of data we have? Do we still need this data? Why do we clean-up our oceans but not our servers? When we visualize our digital traces and present them to people we can actively take responsibility.

Final experiment

The experiments led to some design handles that were a small step at the bigger challenge. The final design aims to create a place where a dialogue can happen so that together we can take a stance.

Currently _Huddle is in Eindhoven, but the vision is to make it travel the world. Make it live like a nomad ask companies to host the device so they become the center of the conversation.