Elf | Translating touch points with the government to life stages

Anjuli Acharya, Tianqi Xiong, Tianlong Mu

Introduction

Welcome to Elf, a conversational AI assistant designed to connect government services across Sweden, ensuring every citizen has access to their rights. Currently, government services operate in silos, making it challenging for individuals, particularly first-generation immigrants, to navigate and access essential information. These immigrants often rely on luck or word of mouth to receive social welfare benefits, highlighting the need for a more integrated and visible approach to government services.

Bridging the Gap

Elf bridges the gap between citizens, especially first-generation immigrants, and the myriad of government agencies by viewing each interaction as a life event. Each life event contains multiple touchpoints that users are notified about when they update Elf. These life events may be individual, such as sick leave or housing allowance, or intersecting, such as childcare and parental allowance. Elf facilitates these events, making the information visible, transparent, and accessible to every individual.

Research

As part of our ethnographic research process, we engaged with over 15 first-generation immigrants to Sweden. We began our exploration by interacting with individuals from diverse backgrounds, each with unique experiences and perspectives. Through open conversations and active listening, we sought to understand their stories and interactions with the government. We mapped these interactions with Forsakringkassen to empathize with the varied journeys of citizens and gain insights into the factors shaping their perceptions of visibility. This data helped us construct a holistic view of the citizen-government relationship, laying the foundation for meaningful dialogue. We used this data to map out their stories through different stages of life and moments of connection and disconnection. Extensive co-creative workshops were held to involve these citizens actively in the process.

Findings

Our research distilled our findings into the analogy of an iceberg. At the visible tip of the iceberg, we find individuals deeply embedded in Swedish culture, enjoying a nuanced understanding of their rights and privileges. Beneath the surface lie first-generation immigrants, who may encounter barriers to accessing and fully understanding their rights within the governmental framework. We sought to answer the question: How might we design for transparency, visibility, and access for first-generation immigrants?

For first-generation immigrants, the Swedish social security system is a blur bubble. To enter it, individuals need support from someone inside the bubble or clear information from another agency. New immigrants encounter barriers to accessing and fully understanding their rights within the governmental framework.

The Path Forward

Through the next decade, how can we make the bubble transparent and permeable? Access can mean many things, so we asked the question: what does access mean?

We concluded that for an individual to fully access Försäkringskassan, they need to go through 3 stages- starting with access, followed by transparency, and then trust.

Based on this, we created sacrificial prototypes. Sacrificial concepts are early, raw, potentially flawed concepts made visual/physical and used as a medium for creating reaction, response, and discussion among users and design teams. Building deep empathy is critical in understanding the people we are designing for. Sacrificial concepts are especially useful for understanding other cultures.

The term “sacrificial” puzzled us initially. What’s being sacrificed? From our understanding, it is the actual concept. In discovering and defining the people we know little about, we come up with concepts that may not be viable or feasible but elicit reactions and responses that help us build more human-driven products and services.

Use-case

The main user scenarios can be divided into two showcases of how Elf interact with people through their daily life.

As an individual, when feeling sick and have to go to see the doctor, people can contact Elf simply through their mobile device, By telling elf some important information about sick status, it will manage all the back-end activities such as the hospital to go to and the exact appointment time. After doctor’s examination and confirmed that a sick leave is mandatory, elf will also reach the documents from doctor’s side to apply sick leave allowance through Forsakringskassan, contact the employer and comfort its master. The only thing left for this person to do by themself is just rest well and wait patiently until the allowance arrives.

When some people suddenly run into each other’s life, their elf also becomes part of their family. Therefore, whenever a shared activity needs to be scheduled, elves will contact each other to balance between two partner’s concern.

Concept

By going through how Raya’s life journey changes before and after elf appears, some key values of encountering elf reveal themselves, which can be described as comforting, accompany and pressure relief.

Elf’s accompany lasts forever.

Elf lives on all your connected devices as a passive widget, alerting you only when urgent action is needed.
At other times, you can activate Elf during your moments of check-in in your life.
You control Elf’s presence in your life, deciding how often it appears.
Your data remains yours — shared information is used solely to provide you with accurate access and information.

Interface

The interface places a strong argument on maintaining a non-intrusive approach. However, a short personal conversation is needed when a person meet elf for the first time, so that elf can understand you better and provide information more precisely. After that, elf will only display the relevant information based on every person’s different life stages.

Service

Elf is a friendly digital assistant powered by empathetic AI, designed to streamline and personalize the interaction experience with public services. Currently, accessing these services requires navigating multiple organizations, which can be particularly challenging during different life stages.

Elf learns about the user — understanding their identity, origins, and priorities — to efficiently connect them with the necessary services, making government resources just a conversation away. Elf is envisioned as a free, always-active service accessible through various digital devices, with synchronized data for seamless transitions between activities. It provides multiple suggestions based on the user’s situation, sourced from official resources, and transparently shows the origin of this information. Decentralized and belonging to the individual, Elf ensures privacy and autonomy, introduced from the first day in Sweden through touch points like the Migration Board’s website and public advertisements.

Conclusion

Elf aims to make government services in Sweden accessible, transparent, and trustworthy for all citizens, ensuring everyone can exercise their rights. Currently, government services operate in silos, requiring individuals to navigate and find information online independently. While this may be easier for native Swedes, it poses a significant challenge for first-generation immigrants who may not be aware of their basic rights.

As a result, social welfare often depends on luck or word-of-mouth information. There is a pressing need to rethink how individuals connect with the government and how the government can make citizens feel seen and supported.

Elf challenges the current decentralised system by viewing each individual through a personal lens, considering their life events and stages. This innovative approach helps us rethink inclusion and exclusion criteria, addressing the dynamic social contexts that influence each individual and their social categories.

Participatory design in the public sector requires a nuanced understanding of privilege and power dynamics. By acknowledging and addressing these factors, we can create more inclusive and effective design processes that better serve the diverse needs of the community. Projects like Elf explore new ways to bridge gaps and ensure equitable access to government services for all citizens.