Reflection & Open Questions

Through CONFi, we were able to explore the idea of conscious, constant monitoring of individuals in the workplace, heightening workers' senses of body and behavior awareness. Yet, a question remain unanswered: how will society's policies surrounding fast-developing technological devices like CONFi respond to such social changes in the future? More often than not, products have long-term effects and consequences that can be unintended and unpredictable, so policies on data-collection and privacy, two main themes that monitoring devices deal with, may greatly change or be created to protect the safety of people. 

Although CONFi is intended to help employees in companies improve how they present and carry themselves in the work environment, we are well aware of the possible effects our device could have on them psychologically. When one is fully aware of how an object is monitoring their every behavior for the entirety of every work day, some may fixate intensely on trying to lead "Instagram-perfect" lives. This sort of exhausting behavior could seriously affect one's mental health. Since CONFi is a newly-launched device, we have yet to see large trends on how it affects workers' mental health. As such, will we have to re-evaluate how effective CONFi will be in the workplace? Will work performance come at the price of how the workers' health?  

Furthermore, mental health has become less taboo in several Western countries, so we may be able to more quickly identify any mental-health-related issues we see and respond accordingly by making the necessary changes to CONFi. However, there are many Asian countries that still associate stigmas with those who seek mental health help, yet self-help and self-improvement products have been rising in Asian markets. CONFi may bring upon significantly different results depending on what cultural background they are implemented in. Although Asian companies may more eagerly welcome CONFi in their workplace to instigate improved work performance, it may be harder to identify any problems surrounding the employees' psychological health. What kind of shift in how people want to interact with CONFi will be see in different cultures?

Given how unpredictable the future is --especially when dealing with technological devices, we had to seriously consider as many long-term consequences that could occur as a result of the use of CONFi. As much as we have thought about the different scenarios that could happen through interactions with CONFi, a plethora of unforeseeable, unintended outcomes will still remain unknown to us until they happen.