Data Date

• MISSION - Design, prototype, and present a service experience in the year 2033, focusing on the theme “the future of mobility”

• TIMEFRAME - Five weeks in Fall 2018

• CONTEXT - Harvard University Master in Design Engineering program core studio assignment 03

• TEAM - Hane Roh, Mengxi Tan, Anahide Nahhal, and Oliver Luo

DOMAIN EXPLORATION

Our exploration began with picturing what mobility systems would look like 50 years into the future. We imagined scenarios where greater mobility meant not only a collapse of physical distances but of physical spaces (through advanced telepresence and holographic projections) and of timescales (through digitized memories and preserved consciousness of those who left us). No matter how divergent our explorations were, we soon realized that what we shared was our common interest in how humans might still be able to genuinely connect with one another in a future world where distance and displacement were the norm.

To launch off our vision for the future of interpersonal connection, we wanted a present-day scenario. For that, we landed on the dining table, where a lot of genuine human-to-human interaction is still happening. To stress-test our scenario, we needed a problem. For that, we landed on long-distance relationships. Our preliminary research into this problem revealed that couples doing long-distance relationships have more trouble maintaining intimacy, and this was expected to grow as our world and lifestyles become increasingly mobile.

Compounding in this problem is our changing relationship with data. Not only are we becoming more familiar with and accepting of the ubiquity of big data, but we’re also increasingly communicating in data – whether through raw statistics or through complex systems driven by machine learning. How can we anticipate what our relationship with data will look like in the next decades, and how will that relationship affect how we connect with fellow human beings?

USER JOURNEYS

To better understand our scenario, we investigated existing dining experiences. Through observations, role-playing, and user interviews, we began to map out the user journey of a couple going on a dinner date in a restaurant. Through this journey, we identified pain points and therefore opportunities for design intervention. We also drafted up a parallel journey for the same date but in the future, where the couple will be sharing the meal virtually through an interactive telepresence system, and we envisioned what that might look like when intangible elements such as micro-emotions, body temperatures, and fluctuating heart rate are quantified and communicated.

While our ability to straight-up process data will improve, it’s still likely the case that data will be mediated, translated, and reinterpreted. What’s more important to our exploration is how this mediation is experienced, especially when mediation happens in what we currently take for granted to be instinctive/reflexive. In other words, we’re curious how, in a potential future, we will connect emotionally when our emotions go through quantification and re-emerge as experiences.

We drafted several possible elements in dining that we could capture and reinterpret, and we iterated on a few of them to see what we found interesting and feasible within our timeframe, eventually narrowing down to two: facial emotion and pulse.

DESIGN AND PROTOTYPING

To prototype the communication of facial emotions, we mocked up a long-distance dining booth. The presence of each of our dining guests would be recorded and projected to the other location. This feed would be dynamically processed through a facial recognition API that evaluates the emotion of the person on six different axes (our eventual proof-of-concept was single-frame analysis). The data would then be expressively visualized on an interactive table, intertwining data of our dining guests’ emotions with data of the flavor profiles of the course.

For the pulse, we used a heart rate sensor coupled with a capacitive touch sensor to capture our dining guest’s pulse. We then designed a form on the table that vibrated in real-time to this pulse feed. The form was ergonomically shaped for the human palm, wrapped in soft felt fabric, and lit dynamically with a warm light to encourage our guest to reach out and touch it. When both guests have their hands on the form at the same time, the form begins to vibrate to the other person’s pulse, evoking the feeling of holding hands.

Many thanks to Hane Roh, Mengxi Tan, Anahide Nahhal, Andrew Witt, Jock Herron, Peter Stark, Ariana Mazzeo, Jenny Fan, Saif Haobsh, Anesta Iwan, Evan Smith, Maddie Hickman, Steve Cortesa, and all of MDE '20