Digital Experiences that Empower, Connect, and Heal

When it comes to digital experiences, I’m just as easily seduced by the latest bells & whistles as the next person — the arrival of Domino’s emoji ordering, for instance, was a particularly exciting tech development for a pizza lover like myself — but the experiences that have really captured my attention and interest over the past couple of years are those that have the ability to empower, connect, and heal.
Experiences That Empower
I’ve always been impressed by the work of Local Projects, a New York-based experience design firm that focuses primarily on designing interactive media installations for museums and other educational institutions. Their recent work with the Museum of the City of New York is a great example of an experience that empowers — as part of the museum’s first permanent exhibition, “New York at Its Core”, the Local Projects team designed a Future City Lab that arms visitors with the data and tools they need to start exploring civic issues, such as how to house a growing population, how to foster diverse communities, and how to manage the impacts of climate change on urban environments. A curved array of screens is used to create a large-scale “map table” that presents visitors with data visualizations of the five key issues featured in the exhibition, paired with maps of the five boroughs of New York. From here, visitors can play an interactive game that allows them to design their own neighbourhood, which is then shown on a wall-sized Kinect-enabled display, allowing them to virtually inhabit their creation. Even for the youngest visitors who might not fully grasp the implications of the data presented to them, the exhibition succeeds in planting the seeds of future civic engagement.
Experiences That Connect
In his 2015 TED Talk, Chris Milk, founder and CEO of the VR firm Vrse, famously referred to VR as an “empathy machine”. Earlier that year, in collaboration with the UN, Milk presented the VR film “Clouds Over Sidra” to 120 diplomats at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The short film’s immersive chronicling of 12-year-old Sidra’s daily life in the Za’atari refugee camp moved many viewers to tears. While some remain skeptical about the use of VR as a fundraising tool in the non-profit sector, and ultimately its ability to bring about lasting change, I think it’s too soon to dismiss the medium’s potential for connecting us to other people, places, and experiences in a meaningful way. VR is an experiential medium and, at its best, it has the power to transport us — emotionally, if not physically — into a world different from our own.
About six months after Milk’s TED Talk, the creative collective Marshmallow Laser Feast debuted its VR experience “In the Eyes of the Animal” in a forest in the UK’s Lake District. Viewers donned custom-designed VR headsets and entered a parallel dimension, something like the “Upside Down” in Stranger Things, but more colourful and free of terrifying monsters. The experience was designed to allow viewers to adopt the perspectives, and perceptual tools, of different forest creatures. When floating through the forest as a midge, for instance, the viewer is able to see carbon dioxide being exhaled by a person hundreds of feet away. I can imagine the effect of suddenly being equipped with a new set of eyes and ears being an arresting one. Whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, it’s hard to deny that creating experiences that connect us to each other and our planet is an important pursuit, perhaps more important now than ever.
Experiences That Heal
Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly interested in conversational interfaces and people’s expectations around chatbot behaviour. But when I read about Eugenia Kuyda’s virtual “resurrection” of her friend Roman Mazurenko in the form of a bot, it was the first time I had considered the ways in which conversational interfaces, powered by increasingly sophisticated AI, might be used in therapeutic contexts.
It turns out that psychotherapy chatbots are already in development — in March of 2016, X2AI began testing their “therapeutic assistant”, Karim, with Syrian refugees in Beirut. Whereas a human therapist can make inferences about a patient’s emotional state based on their body language and tone of voice, Karim must rely on other parameters, such as typing speed, sentence length, and the use of active versus passive voice to intuit mood and deliver an appropriate response. Nevertheless, X2AI’s initial testing in Beirut was promising: a number of subjects reported that expressing their emotions to a bot (rather than a human) helped them overcome some of the social stigma associated with discussing their anxieties. And younger subjects especially seemed more likely to listen to the advice given by the bot, assuming it to be less biased by its own fears and emotions. Of course, there’s a long way to go before bots can entirely reproduce the experience that a trained therapist is able to offer, and we may never get to that point, however AI-augmented therapy is arguably within reach and I’m curious to see how this field evolves over the next few years.
Further Reading
How Interactive Design Can Help New Yorkers Envision Their City’s Future
Want to Know What Virtual Reality Might Become? Look to the Past
When Her Best Friend Died, She Rebuilt Him Using Artificial Intelligence
The Chatbot Will See You Now
