Who Am I?

For most of us, we select or create specific digital memory pieces and share them on social media. For the other people, especially the strangers, they get to know us partially of even completely through this information. Here comes the question: what kind of impressions are we creating for ourselves? Are they the real us?

The initial idea comes from one Facebook feature that we can group our contacts and only show specific feeds to specific friends. People use this feature intentionally to impress different people in different ways. Thus, I want to show how different these impressions are and find a way to physicalize this difference.

A device will create physical representations for the different impressions a user gave to his/her different groups of friends. A Facebook user’s timeline will be separately valued according to the visibility of these friend groups. For the feeds which can be seen by one specific group, they will be valued through some dimensions while a device creating a physical representation. The dimensions may include the number of feeds, keywords of the content, people’s facial expression in the images, comments and the number of likes. The physical representation might be a painting on a cardboard mask frame. The measurements of the feeds will decide the visual elements in the painting, such as colors and shapes. After using this device for a while, several cardboard masks will be generated. The user can put on masks which are made from the cardboards and experience how different his/her is for different groups of friends.