Pooh, Your Social Media Friend?

Assignment:

Prepare a design (form, features, etc) for a near future object that is desirable but has a downside.

Concept:

Our video centers around a connected social media companion named Pooh. Pooh encourages its owner to engage with social media and generate content online. At first Pooh’s owner, the protagonist, is lukewarm about posting to social media and only does so sporadically.

After being unboxed, Pooh makes a recommendation of what to post, based on its knowledge of what is popular on the internet. That post garners the protagonist an unprecedented number of likes. She is not used to receiving that much attention, and becomes enamored with the sensation of her temporary internet fame.

Pooh however, begins posting on the protagonist’s behalf with no regard for the cultural sensitivities associated with posting online under one’s name. Pooh is only programmed to create posts that receive the most number of likes; it either disregards or does not comprehend other potential negative outcomes.

As a result of Pooh’s narrow focus, the protagonist unknowingly offends a number of her friends. Because Pooh has been operating independently of her control, she does not realize what she has posted or that she may have offended people that she cares about. She finds out before her party that several of her friends will not be attending due to Pooh’s social media activity carried out in her name.

As the protagonist falls asleep one night, despite have several friends less than she used to, she has become obsessed with her followers and likes, and drifts of into sleep asking Pooh about her social media stats…

We feel this concepts demonstrates both the dangers of social media and of automation in the context of social relationships. As products are designed to be more predictive and thus provide more convenience to the user, they increasingly carry the risk of making assumptions that could be detrimental to the owner they are meant to assist.

Process:

Initial Brainstorm / Concept Generation

Due to social media's dangers being so pronounced as part of the zeitgeist in 2018 we adopted that as our topic, and began creating scenarios based of the basic scenario of:

Person A gets the bot. The bot helps him/her post something on social media that gains lots of popularity. The person starts to trust the bot

Scenarios

1.  Over time, the person relies more and more on the bot to deal with his social interactions with others. one night, he has a really good date. Both of them goes back home separately and uses bots to communicate with each other. The bots somehow create lots of miscommunications and eventually the two people decide not to talk to each other anymore.

2.  The social bot post something super popular for the protagonist -> the person starts trusting the bot 2) the person goes to a job interview but fails, "i wish you could be there, pooh" and then one day he receives a promo email saying that he can update the pooh so that pooh can talk to him remotely in his head whenever he wants. The person chooses this service because he wants to have better in-person interaction as well 3) he becomes more and more relying on the pooh and gradually the pooh controls what he thinks.

3. The person starts trusting the bot more because he posted something super popular, and then the bot tells him one day that someone unfollowed them and he becomes obsessed with gaining more friends. And the more he listens to the bot the more new friends online he gains, but his real friends start to dislike him. The issue is he is posting obnoxious things that get a lot of likes typically, but they are annoying/braggy/insensitive/showing off his money etc. Then by the end he has 100k followers but when he calls his good friends they don't pick up the phone

Storyboard

Script

Video:

Final Thoughts and Reccomendations: