HyperHuman by IDEO: featured on FastCo Design

Winner of Core77 Speculative Design Award, Runner-up for Interaction Design 2019

2018: Speculative Design Installation at Munich Creative Business Week

Role: Empathy Typewriter (1 of 5 machines) - Concept, Interaction Design, Creating Emotional Datasets, Programming for text-generation, Electronics/Physical Prototyping for Typewriter / RFID Emotion chips etc.

We worked with an international team (Munich, Chicago, London) to develop five machines that represented hypothetical futures where humans collaborated with AI to accomplish tasks that were deeply human.

Empathy Writer: I teamed up with other designers in Munich to create a machine that existed in a speculative future where humans used the assistance of an AI-enabled typewriter to write love letters. A range of 36 emotional descriptors were embedded in different RFID chips, that could be placed into slots describing “me” (the person writing the love letter) and “you” (the recipient of the love letter). Changing out any of the emotions in these slots would instantly change the text in the letter.

The emotional descriptors were nuanced for eg. if the letter writer was described as “nervous”, the tone of the letter would be timid and hesitant - however if the same chip was placed in the recipient’s slot, then the tone of the letter would shift toward being more reassuring. I built in little easter eggs for attributes like “jealous”, “narcissistic”, etc.

I created the text datasets from scratch by creating a matrix for complex emotions, and then assigning complicated emotions with individual weights for the simpler emotion units. The base emotion datasets were created through a combination of Mechanical Turk responses, notes from friends, poetry and lyrics and literature snippets. The amazing industrial designers on the team came up with this retro-futuristic aesthetic and created space for the electronics and delicate cabling (Raspberry Pi, RFID readers, screen, thermal printer).

While troubleshooting, I learnt how to code on a keyboard with no letters on them. #musclememory

HyperHuman Exhibition Description: We're at the dawn of an AI revolution, when clever machines will accelerate us to a more meaningful society: Freeing up our potential so we can focus on what's important, guiding us so we can tackle what matters to us, and expanding our horizons so we can achieve what was once impossible.

But what might that feel like? HyperHuman is a speculative design exploration celebrating the immense potential benefits that intelligent machines can bring to our lives, our work, and our society.

IDEO created a near-future fictional environment with five working prototypes of machines that visitors could interact with and experience. These machines explored how humans' purpose would evolve in the future in an ever-changing technologically driven world, how they could communicate with each other in a way that's attuned to personal and cultural nuances, and other questions surrounding beliefs, creativity, and expertise.

In this extrapolated future where AI is omnipresent, visitors to the exhibition were able to experience how machine intelligences could be used to amplify human strengths and personal qualities; and how to view machines as collaborators - to essentially augment their own humanity.