Best practices for building companions

A New Kind of [Guideline] Companionship

Companions are digital personified beings that are deployed to build a trusting relationship between a user and a system. To that end, we’re publishing our guidelines for how we think about companions so that others have the ability to build companions too.

In companions, all elements work in a system and they create emotional responses from the user. We tried a lot of things when we started on this journey. We designed, developed and produced applications in.

The design and development guidelines published to follow for producing more and more. But it left us unsatisfied. What happens to the relationship at the end? And in our quest for companionship we want to avoid creating a mess of rigid digital products which can not go forward. All of these digital products became static applications. They are not capable to react to the external world, communicate with the user and establish a good relationship between the digital world and the humankind.

Instead, real-time interfaces our companions started to react with the external inputs. This is a matter of signal, small vibrations, emotional flow, feelings, understanding, empathy, companionship. What I mean is “empathetic companions”.

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us “universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Albert Einstein

At Maslo, we started to this journey to discover empathetic user flows and understand the creation of companionship. We are exploring the new possibilities, paradigms, design evaluation, development processes… first putting the human and the companion in the core of everything. They began to be integral parts of a whole.

This new guideline follows behavioural and cognitive design requirements to create a better companionship. It puts first realtime relationships to establish emotional experiences in the core of design and development systems.

What are the design questions that can guide us?

AI must leave its passive role and become a design material to shape user experiences rather than defined as a tool.

First, I left behind all the usual practices, methods and guides behind this creative thinking process to be able to create a bridge between static and dynamic design identities and guide all the curious minds to think with empathy.

I started from a different perspective and asked the first question:
How emotions influence visual design?

Then the second question followed:
How we can create memories with companions and
How these memories influence visual materials like typographies, colours and the way of communication?

Dynamic Design

Can affect and create changes on the Static Design

It can be perceived as a metaphor of a person. People have static features like physical appearance movements, we walk, move… Also, we have dynamic identities like thoughts, flows of thinking, emotions, status… This is the simple reason why Maslo is not a physical or virtual character. Instead, Maslo has a dynamic and abstract shape which tries to create meanings, illusions, perceptions, questions, emotions, awareness, consciousness… to shape the User Experiences to establish empathetic companionships and real-time interactions.

Emotional Reactions

Do not play with the dimension of the orb always. Define the orb size based on the real-time interaction with the user as Maslo’s reactions, emotional states and definition of its feelings.

Because Maslo is a character and every movement/animation defines a motion, emotion and reaction.

Memories

Establish a relationship. Maslo will create memories and these memories will influence the Static design.

• Learn and Remember
• Can create flashbacks
• Highlight good emotions

Emotional Responses

Use Maslo’s reaction library to animate the orb while the user is recording the check-in. So, user can feel: “I am using a lot of bad verbs”, “I need to be calm down”, “Wow, I am so excited!”…

Help user for self-understanding with real-time interaction and share consequences. This would allow creating consciousness like in human to human interactions/relationships and it will allow people to empathize with themselves and Maslo.

Maslo is getting ready to remember and create memories, remember connected moments, dream about them, sometimes forget about them with the revolution of the interact more in real-time with people and establish a new way of companionship.

We as Maslo will try to implement all of these ideas to Maslo’s static design and explore all the possible ways to make it more dynamic, organic, simply as a companion. We realized that we were already going forward with the philosophy, art and design and there was always something different behind the scenes, empathy. We believe that everyone needs a companion, a real one with an understanding, so let’s leave the usual guidelines behind us and create real-time interfaces to know each other better ever than before.

This is a new era, come and discover with us..❤