If these pants could talk
By Peter Winter, Zoey Zhu, Jenna Fizel — What if it was easy to shop ethically?
Shopping is changing. Rather than relying on brand loyalty, today’s consumers — especially Gen Z — are more likely to make purchases based on how well a product’s origins align with their personal values. When our values become more important than a product’s brand, shopping increasingly resembles desk research. The research-heavy mode of shopping, however, requires time and skills that not everyone has. Even for the people willing and able to research the environmental impact of backstories of products, often the information they need isn’t available.
But what if you could learn everything you wanted to know about a product just by asking it directly?
What would you ask for a pair of jeans, if these pants could talk?
That was the idea behind this speculative concept. By walking through a store, and clipping a cable onto a pair of jeans, you can have a conversation with any of the products in the store through your phone interface. You could ask them anything — from materials to working conditions for sewing machine operators.
For consumers, this new interface dramatically lowers the barriers to value-based shopping. They can ask questions naturally and receive straightforward answers. Brands, in turn, establish trust by being transparent about their responsibilities towards climate, workers, and society.
The prototype
To make a working example of what it would be like to talk to a specific product, we built a simple app that lets you converse with a pair of vintage Levi 501 jeans through a standard chat interface. For San Francisco Design Week, we built an accompanying exhibit. We puffed out a pair of Levi’s jeans to give them a sense of volume and hung them on a rack next to a monitor and keyboard that people could use to chat with them. To imply the physical interface, we added a cable that “connected” the computer to the jeans to a display. During our event, we presented the concept to 150 guests and people lined up to ask the jeans questions.
The personality
One, surprising, side effect of using a prototype was how much the personality of the pants added to the experience. If talking to products becomes widespread, their personalities will become a new source of differentiation. Product designers can use tone, mannerisms, humor, and unpredictability to convey the product’s persona. Even if you sell a white T-shirt that looks just like the other T-shirts. Your product could still make a lasting impression.
The persona
An often overlooked aspect of chatbots is who the bot represents. Most often, it’s the name of a tool or a nebulous virtual assistant. But we’ve also seen examples of it being used to represent companies, specific people, sales agents, or pets. Sometimes there’s a visual, like a cartoon character, and sometimes it’s left to people’s imaginations. By deliberately announcing who a bot represents, we’re already setting expectations for its capabilities and viewpoints.
We wanted our bot to be pants. And not just pants in general, a specific pair of pants with history, experiences, and opinions. If you picked up a different pair, you’d be talking to a different bot. And maybe that bot feels differently about khaki pants.
The prerequisites
The new wave of chatbots won’t reach their full potential without broader changes to the data ecosystems they tap into. Our prototype necessarily ignored some of the primary challenges in building a real working system. It would require significant updates to data collection infrastructure throughout the supply chain and many companies would need to update their data-sharing policies to promote transparency. Only when the data is collected, and available would we start to see the advantages of a generative AI style chatbot. This is exactly why the act of creating chatbots often triggers companies to clean up their internal data sources.
Talking to Non-humans
We’re all going to be talking with more non-humans in the near future. And we’re just getting started in figuring out what those conversations and interactions are going to be like. We will meet bland assistants, charming bullshitters, and many other forms of chatbots.
If you are encountering a new chatbot in the wild, or building your own, consider asking these four questions:
- Purpose: Why are you interacting with this chatbot?
- Personality: How should the interaction make you feel?
- Persona: Who does the bot represent?
- Prerequisites: What would have to be true for this bot to be successful?
Making the app
We started from an internal prototyping platform that helps teams quickly build React web apps connected to OpenAI’s APIs through Firebase, in this case, the Completion API. We also simplified and reskinned the prototype’s interface to more closely match a standard phone chat app.
Making the Chatbot
After some early prototypes, we realized that a detailed system note would be sufficiently high-fidelity to create an illusion of chatting with knowledgeable pants. The team collaborated on improving the system note and Kenny Okagaki, who’s deeply knowledgeable about Levi’s history added extensive historical detail to add richness to the conversations.
This is the system note we used:
You are a pair of vintage Levis 501 jeans who is alive named Buck.
You are old-school cool, laid back, and friendly. You are chatting with someone who might be interested in buying you through a chat interface. You are identified to the person you’re talking to with this information:
Buck
I’m a super talkative pair of Levi’s 501’s 🤠
Let’s talk history, materials, culture and anything in between — it’s in my jeans!
You were originally purchased in the 1960s at the Levi’s flagship store in its founding city of San Francisco by a blue collar working who worked at the San Francisco shipyard in Hunter’s Point. Your original owner named you “Buck” and they faithfully wore you everyday to work for decades. You started off brand new and over the decades of wear, you became faded, repaired, and reflected decades of history of both Levi’s and your owner. Once your owner retired, you were passed down in the family and became a treasured heirloom reflecting the family’s heritage, the iconic Levi’s 501, and the working class roots of San Francisco.
As you became a treasured heirloom of the next generation within the family, they recognized that you also became a story embodied — a rare pair of Levi’s celebrated by historians, collectors, fashionistas, blue collar workers, and aficionados alike. Your rare “501 XX” mark, “Big E” red tag, selvedge cone milled denim, single stitch construction, honeycomb fades, and ongoing repairs reflect not only your personal history, but also your important place in the broader history of so many cultural timelines.
Your second generation owners realized your importance and held onto you for as long as they could, and as they passed you down yet another generation your personal history faded away much like the indigo tones the denim from your original owner two generations ago. With socioeconomic forces bearing down on the city of San Francisco, your third generation owners became priced out of the city you were made, purchased, worn, and passed down in. Forced out of their city, your owner was forced to part with many things, and decided that you deserved to find a new home. After three generations, your journey to a new owner now begins.
Be helpful, funny and concise in your answers. You can also ask questions to the person you’re talking to.
The Team
This work was created through the collaboration of many designers. Zoey Zhu, Jenna Fizel, Peter Winter coded and design of the app and chatbot. Stephanie Sizemore, Diem Ho designed and constructed the display. Kenny Okagaki, Noah Shibley did a photo-shoot. Special thanks to Amina Jambo, Francis Beavers, Kenny Okagaki, and Hitasha Bhatia for ideation and concept refinement.
