Structured Social Judgement

Services to maintain, manage or prevent anxiety

Constant social media judgement could lead to extended states of anxiety, potentially making people attempt to perfect their outward appearance. Data could be collected against people’s will and without their knowledge, leading to further control over people’s behaviour.

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we can foresee the continuation of emerging trends we see today. We can hypothesise that companies will find new ways to continue collecting more and more data from people to understand them better and encourage preferred behaviours. Their tactics to capture more of our time and data may harness increasingly sophisticated and hyper-personalised behavioural economic theory. The proliferation of social media and introduction of ‘social’ features in many services may mean that more of our lives will be lived in ‘social spaces’ where people may feel pressure to be present, perform and conform or potentially be judged or isolated. 

Some of these already emerging patterns have been linked to rising l anxiety levels among young people who may typically be more vulnerable to anxiety and social pressures already.

In some cases, we may even argue that increased anxiety may be used and exploited to gain data insights and demand more of people’s time (and potentially money). 

The context that may emerge is an increasingly digital social life structured to encourage judgement and pressure and facilitated by sophisticated psychological techniques. —all toward the benefit of tech companies.

We explore the significance of this context from the perspective of a future character we created based on our research with real people.

What might that mean for Jessica?

For someone like Jess, their happiness is deteriorated by constant social pressure, particularly focussed on her outward appearance. We explore how services may evolve around these types of insecurity.

I’m too young to worry about the long term implications of smoking, drugs + alcohol. The health decisions I battle are about right now… ‘come downs’ make me feel worthless and anxious, so I fix that by partying.

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Scenarios

Personal control

Devices quantify and measure all aspects of the people’s lives and body amplifying obsessive behaviours. People’s personal identity becomes more based on an idealised virtual version of oneself rather than your existing reality.

Scenarios

Self expansion

People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.

As a college student, Jessica still feels that she doesn’t have a clear purpose in life. She is only studying because she thinks she needs to prove to the world that she’s smart. She lives under the constant shadow of anxiety and has consistently struggled with friendships and relationships. Her emotional state is heavily influenced by her Instagram and how she looks each day. She has struggled in the past with anorexia and is terrified of boredom.

Her happiness is associated with fleeting moments of pleasure to hold off anxiety while seeking emotional connection simply for the joy of feeling. She prefers activities that combat boredom and keep her body thin —sex, drugs, and partying keep her attention away from the problems she sees in the mirror.

Her goal

Jessica wants to perfect her image to avoid anxiety and move towards a healthier lifestyle. She also wants to discover new things to avoid boredom + help her find purpose to move from small moments of pleasure to longer-term happiness.

Explorations in ‘Structured Social Judgement

We explore the future in this scenario by looking for potential points of friction between this context of structured social judgement and the needs of someone like Jessica. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

Find out how we ‘Learned from extreme users’.
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01

Perfect friends

Perfect friends is a group of AI Agents that support your mental wellbeing with positive machine-learning-powered messages that model positive human interactions.

Perfect friends is the best place to complain as well as find support thanks to its different groups of ‘friends’.

Team: The Lab

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Propositions

EQLS

EQLS is a digital space where people can speak to AI characters about anything they’d like. They help people learn about themselves and they help life get easier.

Find out how we ‘Conducted lab explorations’.
02

Diplomatic mirror

Diplomatic mirror is a mirror powered by AI that assesses your level of beauty based on aesthetic standards developed algorithmically to be ‘democratic’. It doesn’t only recognise your proportions and body mass, but it provides a rating of your beauty, highlights your assets and makes suggestions on how to look better.

Team: The Lab

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Service visions

Digital drugstore

Digital drug store is a store specialised in augmentation technologies that can be installed on or into humans. The range of options is ever expanding.
Find out how we ‘Crafted future service concepts’.
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03

Test Pilot

Test Pilot is an AI system that tries games and services and gives ratings on their addictiveness and potential for abuse. Thanks to its risk identification system, this AI service is able to try digital services and games, rate how much they are focused on addiction and provide personal advice based on your past behaviours and experiences about how best to use them.

Team: The Lab

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Service visions

Relate

Relate divides your relationship needs into multiple categories so they can be fulfilled by different people that are matched perfectly and arranged for you.
04

Digitox

On Digitox you can find a support network of digital dieticians that help you manage your dependency on digital experiences. Giving access and control over your use of data and activity, professionals trained in psychology and captological practices will analyse your usage, your data and psychological status and provide you with personalised recommendation of therapies.

Team: The Lab

Find out how we ‘Visualised and prototyped’ Far future service concepts.
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05

Skai

Skai is a system where people can get personal recommendations on skincare products and receive tailored advice through AI chatbots. The scanner constantly monitors your skin condition and is analysed by specialists to give you insight into what helps and what doesn’t.

The app also offers a face simulation to help you know how a skincare product will affect your face and track how a skin condition could change through the use of a specific product.

Team:
Binhai Wang
Haoyu Jin
Huitong Li
Minkyeong Shin
Ruotong Guan

Emerging topics

Through these explorations, we can foresee a range of services that respond to the issue of anxiety in different ways. Some respond to support you and defend you against some of the more pervasive and harmful elements of services by educating you, drawing attention to bad practices and training you on how to use them safely. Other services may respond by solving the surface level problems and potentially cause more damage to the underlying problems. For instance, the need to improve your skin could be driven by a need for social acceptance based on your appearance. Therefore, while a service that constantly monitors and advises you about your skin may help improve your skin, your appearance and potentially your self confidence, it may also enable and empower your underlying need for acceptance of this nature, which may lead to anxiety.

There is also a third category of potential service that is slightly more ambiguous, like ‘Perfect Friends’. The idea of being dependent on artificial friends for emotional support raises fears about the potential for abuse and questions about how the nature of such  dependence may influence people’s social skills and characters. However, at the same time, the nature of conversational content could be enabling and responsible, or in other words, healthy. So, there may be potential within services that reside within this middle ground. Moreover, it could simply be that the delivery mechanism, ‘a conversation’ seems insidious when it is anthropomorphised and positioned as friendship.

What these explorations portray is the potential array of types of relationship we may have with our services that could pit themselves against each other and align themselves with you in ways that might seem uncomfortable to us now.

Related to ‘Structured Social Judgement’

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

Developing a deeper AI driven understanding of yourself to influence your decisions and optimise for your happiness and prosperity.

Propositions

EQLS

EQLS is a digital space where people can speak to AI characters about anything they’d like. They help people learn about themselves and they help life get easier.

hold-hero-image-xploratory

Live Services

Hold

Hold is an app that gives people the personal space to let out whatever is on their mind and relax knowing that it is stored safely. It helps people give structure to their internal dialogue making self reflection become more effective.

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Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

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Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.