Concept

Upon approaching Wishwell, participants begin by setting an intention in their mind and adding salt to Wishwell as an offering. By engaging a stimulus, inciting active investment from the individual who is now beginning to look for something to interpret, Wishwell invites investment and commitment to fully engaging with the ritual. The accumulation of salt from past participants creates as history of hopes and wishes for the future, with the amount of salt you add changing the resulting behavior and visualizations formed.

The participant then casts their wish by speaking it aloud. Due to the sensitivity of the microphone, the participant must lean in closely to Wishwell to make their intention heard- when you cast a wish, it is typically very personal and cannot be overheard by others in order for it to become reality. By designing Wishwell with certain material constraints, coupled with existing mental models, we aimed to facilitate an intimate interaction that would perhaps establish an enduring relationship over time. Wishwell then captures keywords from your spoken manifestation and categorizes it into one of five categories, which each map to a distinct audio frequency, vibration, and visual pattern output. This relationship is not made explicit, however, and is intentionally veiled and distorted.

To the participant, the ambiguity lends a sense of mystery but the system’s internal logic processes inputs and simply echoes what has already been said, modeling our critique on the current backcasting of machine intelligences. Rather than drawing explicit attention to this fact, we frame the output through a lens of translation, with Wishwell serving to “translate the universe’s wisdom into visual form” to help you manifest your wish. In this way, Wishwell embodies your intuition, belief in self, and hopes and anxieties for the future.

To tie the entire experience together, we created a ritual guide and chart for folks to refer to, if desired. Language and tone, iconography, and typography were carefully considered as part of the overall feel. Each symbol and its corresponding “reading” was decided based on the thematic categories the system recognizes- health, career, wealth, life purpose, and relationships, which we derived from conventional divination queries and readings.