No amount of words will do justice to how great Pair Play is, so you can save yourself a few minutes by reading this and just download the app and experience it for yourself.

While most apps try to keep us staring at a screen longer, Pair Play does the opposite. It transforms your AirPods into an immersive two player audio adventure where you both hear opposite sides of the same story.

This game abandons the ‘harsh rectangular constraints of a tiny glowing screen’ to embrace audio’s fundamental strength of storytelling. The app has several adventures you can go on with your friend, partner or child (with so many more potential use cases). All it requires of you, is to split a pair of earphones and embrace the experience.

Two is Better than One
This game helps you connect with someone and your environment in a new way. You literally can’t do it yourself.

The first time my roommate and I pressed ‘start’, neither of us were sure of what we were getting into. There was sense of excitement (bordering fear) the first time I was asked to ‘close my eyes’. The narrator started by describing a beautiful scene on the beach with great detail and powerful sound effects…I could almost feel the breeze across my face. No…really! I felt a breeze! On my face! When I opened my eyes, I realised it was my roommate, being instructed to blow wind onto my face to enhance my experience. It was powerful and playful.

Guided Play
We are all familiar with guided meditation apps like Headspace and Calm. Even guided fitness apps like Nike Training Club and Peleton use the power of audio to enhance our real life experiences. Pair Play is creating it’s own niche in this space through ‘guided play’. The app balances guiding the story and encouraging players’ creativity quite masterfully.

It forces you to not take yourself too seriously, embracing that child-like quality that we often forget. Through the stories, you get to be secret agents, zombies, robots and more. You and your friend become the center of action (not your phones) and get to turn whatever space you are in, into a set that comes alive.

No Screen, No Problem
Apart from pairing your AirPods and choosing which adventure you want to go on, you do not need to touch your phone for the entire experience. What’s beautiful is that the audio doesn’t exist trapped on a screen but ‘is overlaid and interwoven with the real world’- augmenting reality. Instead of looking at a screen, you are looking all around you and at your partner, instead of being stationary, you can’t help but move around, and instead of feeling a sense of detachment with what you are ‘consuming’, you experience it with all your senses.

Ever since I’ve been using a computer, I spent hours in this little world that I had a part in creating. Finding comfort and enjoyment in being a tiny dictator over my Sims’ lives as they went to work, decorated their houses, and built relationships. There’s no winning or losing in this world. I was just trying to keep my Sims happy and entertained.

For two decades, The Sims franchise has produced four mainline games, and dozens of spinoffs. The Sims captured millions of fans and made more than $5 billion (Games Industry), and along the way, even changed some lives- all by asking a few simple questions.

If you could be anyone, who would you want to be?
One of my favourite parts of the game was creating the characters. Unlike other games, you can go to great depths defining your avatar’s personality traits. Of course I ended up creating virtual versions of myself and my entire family- it was inevitable. Pete Etchells (Observer) says “Video games place you at the centre of the story — you are an active participant, instead of a passive observer. They offer us a safe place to interrogate and test the emotional consequences of our actions. Far from being a meaningless waste of time, then, games help us explore what it means to be human, to explore notions of love and loss, and to allow us to travel to far-off incredible places, to become incredible people — all from the comfort of our own home.”

What makes you happy?
The Sims is practically an interactive dollhouse where we have control over the environment, but ‘the dolls have just enough autonomy to surprise players.’ Sims are a lot like us — they have hopes, dreams, jobs, and relationships. They need to sleep, eat well, use the bathroom, they even age and die. They fall in and out of love, they don’t bathe unless prompted, and they spend too much time watching TV. You are constantly faced with choices, in this world you can build a character and a home from the ground up, form connections and shape generations. Or, you can burn it all down and wreak havoc.

The gameplay around The Sims can so clearly be explained through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Good luck trying to get your Sim to do anything if you haven’t taken care of their most basic needs like food, sleep and going to the toilet. If you want to buy groceries or furniture for the house then you need financial security, which usually means getting a job (or #motherlode). Social interactions and healthy relationships are crucial to keeping your Sim’s mood positive. We can even see instances of other esteem-related psychological needs being met when a child asks you to help with homework or you get some recognition.

What does it mean to be human?
Although I was the puppet master in this virtual world, the Sims play by their own rules too. Leave your Sim unsupervised for a while as they try to cook? They just might burn the house down. Forget to send them to the bathroom? They’ll just pee on the floor. You only have so much control, and that is often a humbling reminder. Reply All has a great episode about how a teenager who was dealing with the untimely death of her grandmother, turned to the Sims to recreate her as a way to cope with her grief.

Ultimately, the Sims is all about crafting your own stories. The language the Sims use plays a large role in this — Simlish. It’s genius because it stops the game from feeling monotonous every time you play it and it also allows the game to be easily localised for different countries. It’s fun and inclusive — sounds like nonsense, but is solid enough to unleash every player’s imagination.

The suggestion that we may spend more time in a virtual world than the physical one has been developing speedily over the years. The Sims is a rare case of success in an industry that prizes novelty over stability, constantly chasing the newest trend. During the pandemic, video games became a necessary lifeline for many, with sales in 2020 reportedly seeing 37% growth.

Perhaps living in a simulation isn’t a way to avoid reality — it’s a way to cope with it.

Sim-ulation was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are living during a time where so many of our daily tasks have been made easier with devices. Rapid innovation and lower costs have dramatically increased access to electronic products and digital technology. This has led to an increase in the use of electronic devices and equipment worldwide. According to a report by Deloitte, the average U.S. household has 25 connected devices — more than double the 11 that the average household had in 2019. The unintended consequence of this ‘progress’ is the effect of electronic waste on the planet and people. E-waste is now the fastest growing waste stream.

Around 50 million tons of e-waste is being thrown away each year, according to a report published by the United Nations. That’s like throwing away 800 laptops a second. And that figure is projected to double by 2050 if we don’t do something about it. Electronic companies do a great job of designing for pleasure and efficiency but at the same time, they are also designing for obsolescence. Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition put it best, saying that “The fruits of our high-tech revolution are pure poison if these products are improperly disposed of at the end of their useful life.”

Every year, with advances in technology, products are getting lighter and lighter. While this is great for us as consumers, it proves to be a challenge for recyclers. As phones get thinner, companies have started putting them together with glue instead of screws, further complicating recycling. Smaller products are more difficult to break down and tear apart and also generate a lower volume of raw materials. Companies like Recology and EWasteSF have dedicated e-waste recycling programs that ensure no material ends up in landfills. But for an effort like this to be worthwhile, they need to consider the value of the raw materials that can be recovered from a device and how much effort it takes to retrieve them. And the more difficult it is to disassemble something, the more likely it isn’t worth the effort to recycle it.

Only 20 percent of the world’s e-waste is said to be recycled appropriately. The rest ‘ends up in landfill, or is disposed of by informal workers in poor conditions’ according to the UN. While e-waste comprises of only 2% total waste, it contributes to 70% of total toxic waste. Electronics contain a variety of environmentally detrimental chemicals like mercury, lead, phosphors etc. When these chemicals end up in a landfill, they eventually seep into the ground, air and into our water supply. One off the world’s largest e-waste dumps is in Ghana’s capital — Accra. Bloomberg reported that ‘One egg that hatched by a free-range chicken in Agbogbloshie exceeded European Food Safety Authority limits on chlorinated dioxins, which can cause cancer and damage the immune system, 220 times over.’ Thanks to e-waste, the process of colonial exploitation is repeating itself, where ‘developing countries are exploited twice — first for raw materials, then for dumping grounds.’ (OreStreams)

We need a new vision for the production and consumption of electronic goods. It isn’t solely the manufacturer’s problem to solve. We need to work towards a circular economy, where resources are recovered and reused to make new products rather than allowed to wind up in landfills. Designers, manufacturers, investors, traders, raw material producers, consumers, policy-makers and others, all need to play a crucial role in reducing waste by extending economic and physical life of an item and its ability to be repaired.

Resources & Further Reading:

1. American Trash — Colin Lecher
2. The Hellish E-Waste Graveyards Where Computers Are Mined for Metal — Michael Hardy
3. How design led to overconsumption–and how it can help stop it — Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan
4. The Free Repair Manual — iFixit

The Digital Age’s Dark Side was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Internet as a Personality Quiz
On the internet, everything we do is like taking a personality quiz. Every website visit, web search, ‘like’ and click reveals something about us. Except, in this case, we’re not the only ones who see the results. Algorithms are trained to ‘accurately’ infer our personality based on the gathered and correlated data of our actions.

Social media platforms and their algorithms slowly “entomb [a person] as an ever-more stable image of what I like and why,” writes Jenny Odell in How To Do Nothing. The more the self is reduced to “a consistent and recognisable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital,” Odell wrote, the easier it is to market to you — whoever that is anymore.

To truly know oneself is a lifelong pursuit and it’s less about the brand of shampoo you buy than your life story, goals for the future, defence mechanisms and coping strategies, hopes and fears and much more. It’s a lot more data for an AI to crunch, and instead of flattening ourselves into a series of ones and zeros, our complexity is something to protect and celebrate.

Putting the ‘ai’ in ‘bias’
Today, personality assessments are being used at an increasing rate in many areas — education, career development and college admissions. And unlike simple personality quizzes on social media, these assessments are used for serious decisions that can determine someone’s life. The world’s most popular personality quiz is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The origins of this test are not grounded in clinical psychology at all. In fact, Katharine Briggs came up with it at her kitchen table as a method to help people live life according to that best version of themselves. Today, the personality testing industry is valued at over $2 Billion, growing at ~15% a year (Guardian). Since the 1960s, more than 50 million people have taken the test, with more than 2 million people taking it every year, increasingly so for job interviews. Its results are found to be “poorly correlated with job performance and embedded with false and dangerous ideas about race, gender and class that drive bias and discrimination (Macabasco).”

The same goes for many AI-based recruitment tools. In 2015, Amazon realised that their algorithm used for hiring employees was found to be biased against women. All because the algorithm was based on resumes submitted over the past decade, and since most of the applicants were men, it was trained to favour men over women.

Data scientist and author of Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil says “No technology is inherently harmful; it is just a tool. But just as a sharp knife can be used to cut bread or kill a man, AI could be used to harm individuals or communities….This is particularly true because people often assume that technology is objective and even perfect. If we have blind faith in something deeply complex and profoundly opaque, that is always a mistake.”

What do you see?
a. Lime Scooters
b. Sidewalk
c. Scooters on the sidewalk

All three answers are correct, but for some reason, we have a bias to prefer one of them over the other. And what if you live somewhere where you’ve never seen one of these scooters? You might say ‘modes of transport’. This is also correct. What and how we see is based on our background and upbringing. By programming an AI to ignore other answers to this question, we are excluding people who grew up in a different context.

The Self(ie)
Am I wrong to still love personality quizzes? And why do we love personality quizzes so much? If you thought it’s because we’re obsessed with ourselves, you’re only half right. It’s because human beings crave two things — to be understood and to belong. In typical millennial fashion, we outsource our need to understand ourselves better by taking personality quizzes. We are constantly looking for external validation — whether it’s wanting your boss to praise your work, your friends to tell you you’re cool or your parents to say they are proud of you. But this quest for self-awareness can have dangerous implications when it’s used to make decisions about our lives by ‘someone’ else.

I used to have an unhealthy obsession with magazines when I was a teenager. The centre-fold, pull-out posters used to adorn my walls. Reading my horoscope and taking (the most random) quizzes was the highlight of my day. This obsession shifted its medium to digital with BuzzFeed’s obscure quizzes. I treated them as a form of entertainment, sharing with my friends which character I am most like from Mean Girls or which city I should live in. I think the reason why I am so into personality quizzes is that, on some level, they give me a moment of reflection — summarising myself in precise language — even if it’s based on what I just told it. Understanding why I do or feel certain things during particular situations, allows me to confront (or avoid) parts of myself and also helps me make more informed choices.

Despite the fact that the results can sometimes seem stereotypical or over-simplified, we still find comfort through them. The reason why so many of us relate to the answers has a lot to do with the Barnum Effect- a cognitive bias where people are led to believe any generic positive statement when told that it specifically applies to them, when, in fact, it is as generalist as can be.

Computers exaggerate and codify our love of putting things in boxes. Are you an E or I? Gen X or Gen Z? Do think or feel? Are you a morning or night person? Happy or depressed? AI forces the “systematisation of the unsystematiseable,” reduces depth, flattens experience and us along with it. Personality quizzes are a helpful tool when used for self-discovery, but we can’t allow emerging technology to use that information against us.

Resources & Further Reading:

1. The Dark Side of That Personality Quiz That You Just Took — Paul Bisceglio
2. Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless — Joseph Stromberg and Estelle Caswell
3. TikTok’s algorithms knew I was bi before I did. I’m not the only one — Jess Joho
4. The Creepy TikTok Algorithm Doesn’t Know You — Elenor Cummins

Let’s get personal: the UX of personality quizzes was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, over 1 million Whatsapp messages will be sent, 1000 minutes of videos will be uploaded on YouTube. Living in the information age, the speed at which content is created, shared and consumed is nearly impossible to process. Digital clutter is one of the ways this information manifests. Digital clutter refers to the disorganisation of data, files and digital devices-whether it’s the tiny red circles we call notifications, an overcrowded desktop, an endless list of unread emails or a trail of tabs in your browser. Digital clutter doesn’t just slow down your devices, it also slows you down.

I hoard tabs. Their width continues to shrink to an un-clickable level as I keep opening the next link I’m interested in. I currently have 43 tabs open across 4 different browser windows. It doesn’t help that my work set up involved two screens, so they give an illusion of tidiness. Each of my browser windows contains tabs on a specific topic that act as a ‘To-Do’ list. Through tabs, I am able to map my line of thought on a specific topic as I go through. Much like Professor Miller at Harvard University who taught us to use chunking to organise content into smaller clusters to help users process, understand, and memorise easily.

There’s a Japanese term called ‘tsundoku’ which Rachel Withers mentions in her article, that refers to the idea of letting books pile up even though you have enough to already read. The same goes for tabs in our browsers. The tab has had a big impact on the way we experience the web. It goes hand in hand with our collective ‘attention problem and obsession with multitasking.’ A study found that when we switch tasks at work, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back on task. Angus Kidman believes that dozens of open tabs either “signify procrastination on a truly epic scale or a chronic inability to focus on an immediate task at hand. Either way, it’s not the sign of someone working efficiently.”

The sheer volume of information around us is growing at an exponential rate. As humans, however, we have finite mental resources available to process that information. A clean and organised system allows for a more focused, productive and stress-free mind. The feeling of coming home to a clean apartment at the end of the day, with all the dishes done, trash taken out and bed made, is nothing short of relief. So why don’t we tend to our digital spaces as much as our physical environment?

Aniket Kitter at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon believes that people are attached to their tabs because “They’re kind of like opportunities; for a better life: gathering more knowledge, getting a better job, becoming enlightened.” And by closing them would mean to acknowledge defeat and miss out on those opportunities. I’m here to tell you it’s ok to close that tab, go ahead. Your computer is smart enough to store that website should you choose to access it in the future. Simplify your life and just click the crosses on that long line of tabs- the internet isn’t going anywhere.

Resources & Further Reading:

1. Meet The Man Who Invented The browser Tab — Joseph Bernstein
2. My Technology New Year’s Resolutions — Farhad Manjoo
3. Dealing with Digital Declutter — The Zebra
4. Session Buddy — My favourite browser management tool

Keeping a Tab was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Data surpassed oil as the world’s biggest commodity in 2017. Our data is constantly being ‘harvested, collected, modelled and monetised’. We live in a hyper-connected world where things don’t seem to have happened unless you post about it. An emotion hardly seems validated until it’s been shared with others online. On average, we spend a quarter of our lives online. Our online activity will unavoidably leave digital traces in the form of data that will remain even after we die. So with life being lived increasing online, how is it that we have thought so little about our ‘digital death’?

It’s time we started giving our digital assets as much importance as we do with our physical ones. Now more than ever, people have an intangible life online, apart from just their physical one. In order to give users (seeming) control over their decisions, how they wish to be perceived online and respect how different people grieve, we need to reevaluate ‘post-mortem data management’. We need to focus on building systems that support and respect the bereaved, that shine light on how technology is being used at the end of a users life and how information about deceased people is used.

Virtual Cemeteries

It is widely stated that Facebook alone, could have more dead members than living ones in as little as 50 years. But modern technologies are not designed to effectively acknowledge the inevitable death of a user. Until 2015 Facebook had no provision for users to manage their data after they pass. They have since then introduced a ‘Legacy Contact’ feature that allows people to assign a trusted contact who can manage their profile to a certain extent. However, I didn’t know this feature even existed until I started thinking about this topic. While this feature gives some control to the user; it doesn’t take away from the fact that the data is still owned by Facebook. We don’t really know what happens to our data when we die. Who gets to own the data? What happens to our data when Facebook dies? At some point the internet is going to be a virtual cemetery…it already kind of is.

Google rolled out a similar feature called ‘Inactive Account Manager’ earlier in 2013. And though this was a step towards helping people deal with their digital data and grief — it brought up other concerns. Inheriting a digital legacy can complicate the experience of the death of a loved one. For some, it may foster a feeling of connection, for others, the responsibility bestowed upon them to make decisions on behalf of their loved one can be daunting. Technology companies already have a large influence on dictating the way we live our lives, and it is clear that in the digital age, our cultural experience of death is also being dictated by them.

Digital Remains

In a case study by Facebook, they stated that they tried to make sure to remove what they deemed as ‘unnecessary’ reminders of the deceased such as notifications or reminders of their birthday. However, in several cultures, people like to remember their deceased loved ones. Lauren Goode wrote about how the algorithms on multiple apps are not letting her forget about the wedding she decided to call off.

“I realised it was foolish of me to think the internet would ever pause just because I had. The internet is clever, but it’s not always smart. It’s personalised, but not personal. The internet doesn’t know or care whether you actually had a miscarriage, got married, moved out, or bought the sneakers. It takes those sneakers and runs with whatever signals you’ve given it, and good luck catching up.” — I Called Off My Wedding. The Internet Will Never Forget (WIRED)

She speaks about how the digital remains of her relationship act as a constant reminder in her life — even 7 years later. While there is merit in being able to deal with and confront these memories, every individual’s experiences are so unique and require a different level of understanding; one size does not fit all. Forgetting is often a coping mechanism for people and without the death of digital death, that can prove to be a traumatic experience.

Taking Control

How can we empower people to take control of their data while they are alive? How do we support communities who are impacted by a loved one’s death and are grieving? How do we strike a balance between respecting the needs of a deceased account holder and the grieving community they have left behind?

The lack of control the grieving community had over memorialised profiles pre-legacy contact impacted them in various ways. People grieve in different ways — privately, collectively, by compartmentalising. The internet makes it possible to eliminate geographical boundaries, it allows a larger group of people to experience loss together. People grieve on a public platform because it makes them feel as though they are not alone in their pain. There is a psychological need within the grieving process to feel as though pain is not merely isolated to the person experiencing it. The continual existence of the deceased eases the pain of those involved because it causes them to feel as though their messages can still be received, and a part of their relationship can continue. At the same time, since the internet is forever it can mean that the mourning process may never come to a natural end.

The internet is forever, we aren’t. And if we don’t start making decisions about our digital deaths, then someone else will be making them for us.

Resources & Further Reading:

1. Legacy Contact: Designing and Implementing Post-mortem Stewardship at Facebook — Jed R. Brubaker & Vanessa Callison-Burch (Research Paper)
2. I Called Off My Wedding. The Internet Will Never Forget — Lauren Goode (Article)
3. How to Arrange for your Digital Legacy — Barbara Krasnoff (Article)
4. Death Online: Planning your Digital Afterlife — Why’d You Push That Button (Podcast)

Dying to be online was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is always a rise in predictions and trends for the future, especially towards the end of the year. For something that hasn’t even happened yet, the future sure occupies a lot of our brain space. This year, however, it feels a little different. After Covid-19 and all its variants, global economic meltdowns, the climate crisis, greater systemic inequality and surging nationalism — there is an undertone of existential introspection. There is a wave of uncertainty in the air…it feels as if everything is up for an overhaul. Our obsession with the future is because the ‘future’ seemingly promises to eradicate this uncertainty.

People have transformed their entire lives to survive during this pandemic. Home used to be just a place, and now, home has had to become every place. Technology played a vital role in being able to substitute the different physical aspects of our lives from BC (before Covid) to virtual spaces. Whether it was online classes for children vs. going to school, collaborative remote working tools vs. going to the office, or exercise videos to stay fit vs. going to the gym. People (and companies) have had to think creatively and adapt at incredible speeds to get through this time without going absolutely mental.

The world has seen a monumental shift because of the pandemic, but some things haven’t changed. Forecasting is the norm in many industries; and when it comes to the weather, economic cycles, stocks and elections, we tend to listen to what experts have to say because it helps us make decisions and feel more in control. Technology, however, is evolving at an unmatched rate. The world is constantly talking about the next innovation and looking to the future.

The future is not a particular moment in time, but an ‘act of promotion’. With discussions of progress and new technologies, it becomes easier for people to face the misery of the present. We need to be able to gauge legitimate futures from hyped ones, to be able to ask questions and make sense of the world. How did we get here? Who is really profiting from a particular version of the future? Democratising the future means more voices, more possibilities and the opportunity to make it more on our terms. Our vigilance toward the futures being sold to us in the present is key in guaranteeing a better future for generations to come. Shaping desirable futures is both our right and responsibility and these articles are my way of exercising mine.

Why are we so obsessed with the future? was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.