Process

Outline your approach to the project. What ideas did you generate? What did you research and explore? What were the design choices? What were the challenges?

I have an interest in our relationships with personal devices and considered different entry points to bring the spookiness of intelligent machines more visible. The home seemed like the most relatable context for my investigation. With a person's bedroom as a starting point, I began modeling it in Dimension.

In conjunction, I began researching the future of IoT devices, human relationships with personal devices, and AI. I also asked my friends and family what they find is spooky about their personal devices. The most common thread I heard was the vast amount of knowledge it contains and the possibility of AI & automation to replace humans. 

These insights led me to a verbal conversation between devices as the method to make their knowledge and intelligence obvious through personifying them. 

Reflection

Did it build the conversation you hoped, or meet the intent driving the work? Why? What worked and what didn't? What did you learn? What would you do differently?

I think my project met the intention of the piece: to reveal and question the types of data exchange between different IoT devices in a smart home. By showing rather than telling, the piece was able to invoke more questions rather than prescribing a POV.

After finishing the piece, I think that the degree of spookiness for viewers would be different. By now, we are already familiar with smart home devices and know they collect information about us. But I feel that this conversation, particularly the role of human intelligence and artificial intelligence, could be investigated further in ways that are even more extreme as the next steps for exploration.