Happy Society

Project Overview

In the society we live in, people are ranked in more ways than we are most likely willing to admit. We rank people based on background, income and even social status. The ranks we reside in heavily impact our privileges, well-being and even happiness.
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Initially however, these ranks seem to have no correlation with one of the most personal, private elements of our being, our emotions.
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In this short speculative design project we took the opportunity to create probes and ask questions around this private good, emotions. What would happen if our emotions were no longer ours? What would it mean if we were ranked based on our emotional state? What would happen if we were emotionally naked?

February 2021
5 weeks execution time
Speculative Design Project
Umeå Institute of Design

Teammates
Linda - MFA Interaction Design
Mina - MFA Interaction Design

Project Goals?

1. Probe: present a scenario that makes people think
2. Discuss: create conversations around important issues
3. Provoke: trigger critical thinking and reflection

What happens in the Happy Society?

Everybody is monitored

Happiness is monitored through a patch in the back of the neck.

Everybody is ranked

There are societal ranks based on happiness score.

Everybody is influenced

What would people's behavior look like?

PROCESS

In this project, we were set the challenge to combine elements from speculative design and bio design into a concept. Throughout the project, the focus was on co-creation with scientists from the microbiology department of Umeå University. In sessions hosted by tutors as well as ourselves, we worked alongside scientists to build towards a concept. We took the opportunity to inspire each other and learn from one another. This process was not without challenges.

Context

Processes of co-creation can be unpredictable and require great effort from both sides to build a dynamic and fruitful relation between the designer and co-creator. In our case, we got to work with scientists as co-creators. Scientists are taught to think rationally, taught to seek proof, taught to distinguish right from wrong. As designers, we seek things that are beyond the rational, we search for what is in between the right and wrong.
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When these two perspectives came together there was an interesting forcefield created. We were challenged to find a way to merge these perspectives and to allow each other to step into the other’s world.

Co-creation

Slowly but surely, after building trust, creating probes and being vulnerable to one another we created an environment that was much more fruitful than we had anticipated. This was the moment we could really take the scientists with us in our thought patterns and together we could ideate on speculative world scenarios that lie beyond the ‘possible’.

Finally we sketched a world scenario that we designed to make people think critically about one of our most private goods, our emotions.
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We build around the concept of being emotionally ‘naked’, which can also be understood as being unable to hide one’s true emotions. What if our emotions and feelings were no longer just our own? What would the world look like? What does it mean to be emotionally naked?

Result

We sketched a dystopian world scenario in which at birth, every person gets a tracking patch placed in the back of their necks. This tracking patch tracks an individual's emotional state by analyzing the composition of the sweat they excrete.

Concept

By analysis of multiple parameters within the sweat, we would be able to detect what emotion a person is experiencing at any given moment.

The emotional state of every single person is monitored. This way we can easily distinguish more happy people from the crowd.

Every individual’s monitored emotional state is converted into a cumulative score that increases with happy emotions and decreases with negative emotions.

Every time a person experiences an emotion, this influences their cumulative score. The happiness score divides people in ranks.

People that are ranked higher, and generally more ‘happy’ get certain privileges in life. Examples of such privileges are access to certain buildings or eligibility for certain jobs.

Generally, only the state and state-funded companies have access to this score in real-time. Besides this, the score gets read out to you once a day, right when you wake up.

This results in a world that revolves around a monitored emotional state, where even your social relations have to move aside to rank up.

Our video is meant to bring this world to life and make people ask questions and wonder about societal ranks, emotions, privacy, ethics and happiness.

Throughout the process of building this scenario, we already got a taste of what the effects of this hypothetical scenario could be. When discussing the world we were imagining in our team, we got carried away plenty of times (in a good way). We imagined how we could cope with such a world, how it would be to grow up in such a world, and what kind of person we would become.

Implications

Similarly, in our second to last co-creation session we presented a rough sketch of our scenario to one of the scientists, Teresa Frisan, and this resulted in an hour long provocative, inspiring discussion that made us understand how close this dystopian world actually is to our own. It made us see what dark sides of society we were highlighting in our scenario. This session gave us faith that we were on the right track. To quote Teresa Frisan; "If you wanted to do provocation – this is a bomb!"
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And as we were hoping for, in our last co-creation session with all of our fellow students and collaboration partners we had a similar experience. After showing them our video we asked them to map out their thoughts and the discussion that followed was more than a proof of concept.

Some of the most interesting questions that were raised and discussed.‍

Could you manipulate the system?
Are we already ranking people based on their happiness?
What is misuse of emotions?
How fake would our emotions become?
Who do we currently share our emotions with?
Would we feel numb?
Would we resent our emotions?
What power do emotions currently have?
How would our social relations change?
Can we steer our own emotions?
Would we ever feel real happiness?

REFLECTION

Initially, co-creation seemed quite daunting to me. I was aware that co-creation would be much different from user studies and other ethnographic practices, because co-creation is more of a two-way street, where you are both equally involved and invested. These fears however seemed totally unnecessary and the co-creation sessions brought me more than I had expected. I felt inspired by the scientists in a different way than by my teammates. I could see that their way of looking at things was vastly different, and it challenged me to look at things from their perspective, rather than my own. Also, it taught me a lot about communication. The language and approach we as designers use, are familiar to us, but more than once, it became apparent that these are not as universal as we think. The way we as designers can easily think on a conceptual level and talk about rather ambiguous things is a good example of this. Understanding these differences and working with and through them has helped me grow as a designer and makes me feel more prepared for co-creation sessions in the future.

Secondly, this project was my first real experience with speculative design. I understood the concept of speculative design, but I was not aware of what a process towards a speculative concept would look like. Figuring this out along the way was challenging, but also super rewarding because all of the people involved seemed super eager to share their opinion, much more than in other projects. I still feel like I have a lot to learn about speculative design, and mostly about the responsibility thereof. In our last evaluation session one of our external teachers questioned us about how we saw our responsibility as designers when bringing concepts like ours forward. He made us aware that concepts like these can be quite dangerous if understood improperly. Even with the best intentions, we have to take our responsibility very seriously and make sure our ideas are conveyed in a way that provokes, but does not harm. This is a learning process that I will have to take more seriously in any future speculative design project.

HAPPY SOCIETY

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