Spark

Your money fingerprint

Spark is a service that helps you discover your financial personality to align it with your consumption. It helps you make better financial decisions and achieve financial health and wellbeing.

What is the problem?

We know that people do not always act rationally or in alignment with their intentions, which from a financial perspective often means that money is not used in the ways that bring people the most happiness. This could be because it is either spent too much at times when frugality would bring more happiness or because it is spent on things that are not the optimal way to exchange money for personal value.

Within this context, we can look to the world of financial institutions and argue that the services in place to serve people financially are set up to profit from people’s bad decisions rather than to help people achieve more wellbeing. For young people just graduating college and entering their first jobs, there is a sense of anxiety that they do not have the necessary control over their money and that the way they interact with services often feels like a ‘one-size-fits-all’.Ultimately, they feel the solutions provided don’t fit their lives. Moreover, people’s financial behaviour changes according to their personality, meaning that you will spend and save money in different ways, and that you will take happiness from how you’ve spent your money in different ways depending on your personality. 

There is a mismatch between banking services’ blanket approach to supporting people financially and the reality of how people interact with and value money. It’s in this environment that young people are leaving education with low financial literacy, low savings and new financial responsibilities and expectations. This not only leads to anxiety around financial decision-making, but also to ineffective relationships with money that can perpetuate and have serious implications on people’s lives.

How ‘Spark’ responds

Spark responds to these issues by integrating the attributes of more personalised lifestyle services with typically rigid financial tools. This means that not only does the service understands its users and customises the advice it gives accordingly but it is able to tune the entire service right down to the financial dashboards. In this way, the objective of the service is to help align how someone uses their money with their personality type. In doing so, it builds clarity and a sense of control that can improve people’s long term financial health and wellbeing.

Personality Test:
When they start the service, the first thing people do is complete a quiz about their personality, which provides them with a match,   showing them how people with their personality typically like to spend, save or invest. Money does not equal happiness, but when people spend their money according to their personality, it can lead to more happiness. This personality test is the first step to creating a bespoke service for each user.

Mirror:
Through open banking, people connect their different accounts so that Spark can analyse and then reflect back to people how they spend their money. These categorisations and visualisations can give a fresh perspective, which  can help people understand where their money is going and how much they’re really saving. This alone may help people find a new level of control and illuminate opportunities for new habits that will make them happier.

Goals and Advice:
Spark combines its understanding of people’s personality and their spending behaviour with specific financial and life goals so that it can provide the most meaningful advice possible. It’s able to show people a path forward of what can be achieved if they take Spark’s financial advice.

Access:
Finally, Spark gives each user a financial health score based on their financial behaviour . This score is connected to how well they are progressing toward a goal or how much they are improving. A high score means a user has access to other Spark accredited financial services like a low cost loan or or a better credit card.

Find out how studio teams ‘defined the problem area’.
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What we
learnt

We demonstrated a low fidelity prototype of Spark  to our users and their response was very positive, generally demonstrating a high desirability and a promising area of opportunity for using these approaches to improve people’s control over their finances. The proposition also sheds light on some interesting questions that emerge as services move into these new spaces.

It’s clear that there is a relationship between people’s personalities and their financial habits. When this relationship is incorporated into services, it can offer people more control and potentially greater happiness for the same amounts of money. However, while tailoring financial services to people’s personalities might be good for some people, it’s not clear how vulnerable these systems may be to bias (against particular personalities) or what it means when a user shifts between genuinely changing their character or behaviour, playing the game just to do better, or simply cheating the system. Below we explore the overall topics.

Find out how studio teams ‘built their prototypes’.
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01

Engagement

Through the research, we realised that there was a lot of connection between people’s anxiety and stress and their financial health, but that money management was seen as boring for the target users. The perception was that these financial considerations were something for later in life so the challenge in the service is about how to help people engage in a productive but seemingly ‘boring’ process.

Users found Spark to be valuable because it responded to this problem by making it fun and engaging. Firstly, by stating that there is financial gain to be had from using the service, then by using an engaging and illuminating quiz and finally, by making the service about almost everything else except money and visualising money in relatable terms like the number of activities they could do with it. It’s through these mechanisms that people were able to enjoy the concept. We found that even by simply visualising people’s money differently, behaviour could be changed, and this could ultimately lead to increased wellbeing.

02

Avoiding addictiveness

We found that there was some concern among users that a service like this could become too addictive. The gamified elements of the service make it fun, which in combination with the importance of money in people’s lives and how often they interact with it, it seems that it could become a fertile ground to cause addiction, which would ultimately have a negative impact on people’s anxiety levels. In response, Spark could attempt to recognise addictive behaviour and move certain activities into the background to prevent the user from over-interacting with the service in unhealthy ways.

03

Avoiding biases

An emerging issue within the spark concept is around how a service like this can base its offerings on someone’s personality in order to tailor the service, without also risking excluding people from financial services because they might have personality traits that are less ‘financially attractive’.

When considering access to credit, people can adapt how they look in the app and play the system to get the best financial opportunity. However, there is also a risk that people with less common personality traits may not get access to a financial opportunity because their profile is poorly understood and therefore represents a risk. How can financial services adjust to people’s personalities without essentially discriminating against people based on their personality?

04

Playing, Cheating or Changing

We also see an emerging issue regarding how people might adapt to financial gain. If we envisage a scenario where people are able to convince a service that their personality is more financially attractive, then there is a lot of evidence to suggest that people will do so. If we build on this scenario, proposing that in the future someone’s personality will be more intricately understood by the service through more sophisticated data and analysis —at what point does it become impossible for the user to game the service and to what extend would users adjust themselves and their lives and the appearance of their personality to be seen as more ‘financially attractive’? Could the overlapping of personality and finance, in more sophisticated ways, lead to the emergence of characteristics that cost people more money, essentially ‘expensive personality traits’?

The proposition is premised on the idea that by offering people information about their personality, their behaviour and the financial system, they can be more in control of their finances and their financial wellbeing. Users are essentially encouraged to play a game with their personality and their behaviour in order to improve their financial wellbeing. At what point does playing the game mean sacrificing too much for the sake of financial wellbeing ?

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Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Jump to:

Service visions

Guru

Guru helps you build your well being using your money. First it connects your banks to Guru and gets to know you through a short personality test, and shows you all of your financial information in customisable ways that help you understand how your spending is connected with your wellbeing.
Find out how studio teams did a ‘synthesis of the insights and discussed their learnings’.
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Our new direction of exploration

If this proposition is progressed, the strategic question of relevance to our investigations is more along the lines of:

As the world of financial wellbeing overlaps with sophisticated personality assessment, how can we find a  balance that encourages an appropriate level of gaming one’s life for financial wellbeing, without damaging people’s freedom to be who they want to be or discriminating against people based on their personalities?

Team
Nikos Melachrinos
Nafeesa Jafferjee

Related to ‘Spark’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Would you like to know more?

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

Spark

Your money fingerprint

Mymes uses an understanding of people’s behaviour to create simulations of their future to help them make decisions .aIt distills different sides of their character to help them explore who they are.

What is the problem?

People sometimes struggle to make decisions that benefit their future and a lack of identity exploration can hinder people’s resilience.

The Mymes proposition responds to two overlapping problem areas. On the one hand, we see that people, particularly young people in significant transitionary moments of their lives, struggle to make complex decisions.

For instance,, we can see that lifestyle related decisions perhaps around food, stress, exercise, sleeping or smoking, drive a huge amount of the chronic health conditions faced in the United Kingdom On the surface, it’s possible to argue that the healthier options in these cases are simple to choose, i.e. ‘don’t smoke, eat healthily, sleep more’, but in reality people have to make complex assessments to do with money, work, finance or relationships,which can make these decisions difficult.

The other area of interest within this proposition is about the exploration of identity. Research suggests that when young people explore their identity i.e. they try out different models of identity, experimenting with how they can fit within the world and see themselves. They can often be more emotionally resilient later in life when something challenges the identity they had established. It is argued that as a consequence of having experimented with who they are, they become more capable of reforming their perceptions of themselves without the same level of emotional loss as somebody who had not experimented. Additionally, it could be argued that people have different identities during the same period. Someone may act, behave and feel completely different during different contexts even on the same day, therefore, it may not even be that people are experimenting with their identities one at a time. This proposition also considers how AI may be adopted to support people as they navigate the complexity of identity exploration.

How ‘Mymes’ responds

Mymes empowers users with high levels of personal data and insight. It uses this data to show people future versions of themselves, which are based on their choices in the present, enabling longer-term decision making. The service also helps people understand a nuanced, multi-faceted perspective of their identity, expanding people’s concept of themselves and encouraging self-exploration

Simulate the future:
Mymes creates a digital avatar of the user, simulating potential future outcomes of their decisions through AI. Initially, it would take in data from all of your other apps and support simple decisions, such as how to adjust your daily commute in ways that might save you money or uplift your mood or improve your health. But after a while,the service would start to develop its own intelligence about you and simulate more complex alterations to your life. It allows people to explore their  potential future realities, helping them think about longer term implications and consider more options.

Monitor and track your life:
Mymes drives its simulations through the monitoring of any actions people allow it to monitor by connecting with other apps and devices. This data not only drives the simulations, but it also helps people understand their own patterns simply through giving them more visibility and transparency on their behaviours. Essentially, the service is trying to use the power of its data to help build a users’ agency through teaching them about themselves, and subsequently helping them make more informed decisions by themselves.

See different sides of yourself:
As Mymes learns more and more about people, it’s able to discern different modes of behaviour that happen at different times, in different cycles, in different places, at different events, under different conditions and with different people. It categorises these variations in people’s behaviour to form representations of different sides of them, so they can see the different modes of behaviour they adopt in different circumstances and with different people.

See how different versions of you behave:
These different categories can be explored by the user allowing them to see things such as their spending behaviour, the types of food they eat, and depending on the sensor data that Mymes is allowed to collect, it could even monitor some variations in emotional states. These different categories of self, could distinctly represent elements of people’s identity that are heightened in different contexts and help them discern a more varied and nuanced understanding of themselves, rather than trying to form a singular coherent concept. In doing so, Mymes creates paths to explore identity in new ways.

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Service visions

Sides of me:

A platform that uses AI to monitor your emotions and behaviours in order to understand all the different sides of your character.
Find out how we did a ‘backcasting of the value propositions’.
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What we
learnt

We demonstrated a low fidelity prototype of Mymes  to high-need users and this is what we learned:

  • that many people appreciated that the problem Mymes was trying to tackle was real and that the general approach of the service was appropriate; 
  • most people were sceptical about how much they would use the service; and,
  •  there was a lot of disagreement among users about how the strategies could be refocused to improve it.

Emerging conversations from this proposition are about:

  • the way that choices can be supported by technology without becoming invasive; and, 
  • how having multifaceted representations of oneself could practically be valuable in everyday life.
Find out how we ‘Discussed the implications of the prototypes’.
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01

Only some choices should be supported

An interesting area of discussion that emerged with users was around what was an appropriate recommendation, or simulation to be given. The general approach of the service proposal was that it could be wide ranging and encompass large categories of your life, offering anything from health simulations to career simulations. The simulations were illustrated to give people a more engaging way to interact and understand the outcomes of their actions, but most users found these illustrations inappropriate for anything other than very practical choices.

There was wide disagreement among the group about how and when people wanted an intervention from the app. Some said that it could feel overbearing for the intervention to be regular. Some said that it would be best if it intervened regularly in small health choices that have larger long-term implications (like dietary choices for instance). Others felt that technological services like this could only help with decisions that are failed by absentmindedness, therefore the service could intervene to improve the decision.

This variety of opinion is evidence that services that become intertwined so intimately with people’s lives, either need to learn to be adept at responding to the users’ cues for assistance or they need to have active personalisation built in the service experience.

02

Categorising identity

People found the concept of categorising different aspects of themselves useful as a mental exercise. And for many of them, it helped them feel positive about themselves because, to them, it meant they had varied and complex characters. Many participants also talked about how the recollection of sides of themselves, which are now less active, was both nostalgic and powerful —because although that side of themselves was less active, they felt it still belonged to their identity and seeing or describing it enriched their current view of themselves.

Although most participants felt that categorising sides of themselves was meaningful and rewarding, they struggled to see how digital categorisation would be helpful in their lives beyond simply being a reminder or an archived part of themselves. The proposal essentially suggests that a divided conceptualisation of the self, might expand people’s self-understanding. And that reminding people of their potential to be multifaceted could encourage them to explore more. However, this relies on a large assumption that the categorisations would be sophisticated enough to be taken seriously and would inherently convey a message that, ‘people can be whoever they want to be’. To the participants engaging with the proposal, this was not a safe assumption and the feature was unappealing.

If we simply consider the fact people felt enriched and more powerful having recalled categories of their personality (without the strategy employed by Mymes), it is clear that it is a valuable component of people’s self-reflection, and therefore, perhaps there are still some interesting questions to be explored in this space with different concepts: Could reflecting on oneself through the lens of different personal identities help people feel more free to explore and act in ways outside of their current ‘preset character’? Could it help them understand themselves in more depth? Could it help people to act with more control?

Jump to

Propositions

Spark

Spark is a service that helps you discover your financial personality to align it with your consumption and help you make better financial decisions and achieve financial health and wellbeing.

Our new direction of exploration

If this proposition is taken further, the strategic question of relevance to our investigations is more along the lines of:

Can AI driven self-understanding benefit people in new ways by encouraging a categorised view of self-identity, and how can AI enriched decision-making interject in people’s lives in a non-invasive, supportive manner?

Related to ‘Spark’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Would you like to know more?

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

Spark

Your money fingerprint

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.

What is the problem

EQLs responds to the problem of increasing rates of anxiety in young people particularly in relation to anxiety caused by social media. For a young generation of people in the UK, social media is almost essential as a means to be connected and considered, particularly in the transition from education to more independent adult life, There have been many connections drawn between a rise in anxiety and the use of social media, largely attributing blame to the way it creates a culture where physical appearance and constant presence put everyone on a stage in front of their peers, all the time. For some, this is fine, for others it can lead to a perception that appearances must be relentlessly kept up and that not meeting social norms and fashions could result in exclusion or bullying.

In this context, people may technically be digitally connected to each other but feel unable to share feelings and stresses with one another. While mental health issues are now talked about more freely than they used to be, there is still a stigma associated with anxiety, which may leave many people feeling unsupported and isolated. Beyond simply not sharing these issues with others, it’s possible that many people absorb that stigma to the point where they don’t even self-reflect because of its association with mental health.

How ‘EQLS’ responds

EQLS offers people a safe space to have whatever kinds of conversations they need without having to be concerned about social pressures. Although these AI characters are not real, people are able to process thoughts, and find some calm and comfort through the act of conversation. EQLS gradually learns the user and helps them learn about themselves and make plans in order to build a self-reflection practice, which will help them overcome anxiety and build emotional resilience.

A range of AI characters to talk with:
EQLS is the name of the service as well as the term for the AI characters. Each ‘EQL’ has a different character so that each user can decide who they would like to talk to depending on what kind of mood they are in. Whatever their mood, there is a character that will offer what they  need and listen to whatever the user has to say without any judgement.

Track your mood:
EQLS is connected to the user’s wearables and devices and is therefore able to detect when someone might be in distress or becoming unhappy. In which case, the EQLS can intervene by suggesting that the user talks with them about whatever is happening in their life to help them reflect, understand and process their feelings better —or simply to relax talking about something else.

Learn about your patterns and make plans:
Over time, EQLS learns more about the user and enriches its knowledge through what the user talks about in the app. With this heightened knowledge, the service can begin to recognise patterns in someone’s mood connected to their behaviours, activities, or social life, and the service can draw the person’s attention to the pattern. This demonstration of patterns may help people see tangible examples of emotional influences in their life or they may help them learn about new influences. For example,  someone may feel anxious and unhappy after every party they go to. In thi case, EQLS would demonstrate that and help the user make plans about how to adapt.

Relax completely:
Alongside conversational reflection techniques and awareness raising tools, some of the EQLS characters can also help the user to relax and unwind using mindfulness, meditation sessions or even sleep stories.

Chat with real people who have been through the same things as you:
Under particular circumstances, EQLS can put users in touch with one another so that they can share experiences. The match would be made when someone has had similar experiences to the other user in the past, but has come through that particular problem. In doing so, both parties are able to talk, reflect and support each other in a safe space, without judgement. Critically, they will be reminded that they can share things with real people as well as EQLS characters. This kind of matching would only be done where enough is known about a user and when the user is fully comfortable with the idea.

Find out how we did a ‘backcasting of the value propositions’.
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What we
learnt

We demonstrated a low fidelity prototype of EQLSto high-need users and this is what we learned:

  • We found that people generally had a strong sense that this could be of help to them because they recognised the value of conversation (even if it was with an artificial character) and because they saw great value in using more personal data to give them new insights into their patterns and behaviours. 
  • However, they all expressed a range of opinions about how the app is positioned in terms of who the agents are, how seriously the process should be portrayed and whether it was a space only for mental health support.
Find out how we ‘Discussed the implications of the prototypes’.
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01

How serious can it be?

Some users responded to this service by expressing that it was refreshing to see an app for people with mental health needs, which wasn’t purely devoted to the moments of struggle. They described that a lot of existing apps on the market are purely for when you are down and are only about learning and describing or analysing their issues. The problem with this is that these services only develop negative connotations and become a symbol of bad times and intense experiences. What was refreshing for them about EQLS is that it recognises people’s need to sometimes be more passive or less intense by either having access to sleep stories or just informal conversation that can be about whatever the user wants.

However, there was a division among users about how serious the service should feel. While some wanted to avoid too much intensity, others expressed that they would not take the process seriously, if it was anything other than a devoted emotionally therapeutic space. They felt that divulging intimate information required effort and investment, and for them to trust that this investment was worth it, they needed to respect the authority of the service. A respect that was damaged by the presence of lighthearted characteristics in the agents or more casual activities like sleep stories. They needed more seriousness, more obligation and more expectation on themselves in order to engage.

This issue represents a sensitivity that must be considered in any service of this nature. The overall positionality of the service (not just any interactive characters) must sit in a balanced framing. It somehow needs to invoke respect and authority in order to prompt significant investment from the user. At the same time, it can not be too demanding and intense because the service could become solely associated with negativity and hard work.

Embedded within this balancing act is an assumption that digital services must provide value more immediately, which strains interactions that typically require higher investment for higher intrinsic value gains. Theoretically, if a service produces value for someone, then they will come back. But what if the value a service produces is not immediately present, visible or understandable? Does this challenge demonstrate how an array of valid digital services may not yet be acceptable to the market? Do deeper benefits have to be smuggled in behind immediate gains? Are there preset, accepted levels of relationship that we can have with apps or with our phones?

02

Dependance vs Resilience

For some participants the proposition of speaking with artificial agents seemed unhelpfu,l but for many it seemed like a powerful alternative for the moments when they needed support. They described how speaking to AI agents represented a safer and a more constant support structure than the people in their lives because they could find support at any moment without feeling like a burden on someone else or risk being judged or having their trust betrayed.. Does this sentiment represent a lack of trust among their support network, an increased level of trust in technology or a growing level of willingness for people to engage in services that transparently leverage their own irrationalities for our own gain?
Some participants alluded to concerns about what this might mean over a longer period of time:
What would happen if people became used to or even dependent on artificial agents for emotional support?
How would people draw boundaries between artificial and real relationships? What would this mean for people’s human relationships?
Would people expect more or less of those around them or even just connect with them less?
If people only share their problems with AI agents would everyone feel like they were the only ones struggling? Would this really help people feel supported?

Overall, while the AI agents seemed highly valuable to people, the reception was dampened by a sense that it could easily escalate into a more harmful space where people’s other forms of support network, whether they be friends or therapists, might be impacted or replaced and therefore, ultimately diminish people’s resilience. So, to what extent should these conversation agents be anthropomorphised? And, what might a service like this do to correctly balance the user’s dependence on the service, with their dependence on the self and on those around the user?

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Service visions:

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.

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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.

Our new direction of exploration

If this proposition is taken further, the strategic question of relevance to our investigations is more along the lines of:

Is artificial, anthropomorphised character (or multiple characters) a good delivery mechanism for emotional support and how might this influence long term resilience?

Related to ‘Spark’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Would you like to know more?

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

Spark

Your money fingerprint

The elderly are sidelined, but new tools could help connect them in communities and fight for a place in society.

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we consider the potential for emerging trends in technology that may influence relationships

We project that existing trends of social isolation among the elderly may progress further into the future. We suggest that as life expectancy extends and work becomes more global, families may disperse and the elderly may be less supported. In this context, an already vulnerable demographic of society may become even more neglected and witness a deterioration of services that can accommodate their needs. Whether it’s transport, retail or entertainment, elderly people may feel like their communities are shrinking and that they are becoming less able or welcome to engage in society the way they’d like to. 

We also propose that as national institutions defile public trust, alternative means of taking action in the world may prosper. We consider that online collectives may become a more powerful means of organising around common interests and specific grievances. These collectives may gain in sophistication in the way they grow and how they amass evidence toward their cause. We may see platforms emerge that use concepts such as clicktivism, crowdfunding and social media mobilisation to advance their methodologies and have impact on the world around them. 

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

What might that mean for Sandra?

For someone like Sandra, whose friendships are reducing and who feels neglected by society, meaningful connections with anybody can bring a little joy. We can explore how services may challenge or meet the needs of people who feel sidelined.

I feel good knowing my daughter’s family is ok… every time the phone rings I wish it was him. Sometimes I hear the phone ringing even when it’s not.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Enhanced relationships

People may expand their freedoms to live how they like and subsequently have the types of relationships they like in a more transient but online world. New arrangements of relationship may be initiated, supported, or managed by AI and usher in even more radical concepts of relationships.

Scenarios

Digital Childhoods

Children may spend more of their time in online environments that can transform their educational and creative experiences but equally have increased capacity to captivate and shape their world view in potentially problematic ways.

Sandra lives in a three-bedroom house with two cats. Her daughter lives in Finland and her husband passed away fourteen years ago. She spends most of her time sitting and watching documentaries because she has a weak hip but she sometimes takes her scooter to the community centre to see other people and talk about what’s going on around town or share old stories. Although she enjoys going out, she increasingly feels like she’s unwelcome in town – it feels as though she gets in the way. She has been to three funerals for friends in the last 18 months. Her biggest fear is having a serious health problem that will cost more than she can afford.

Happiness for Margaret is knowing that her daughter and grandsons are healthy and happy and she talks to them whenever she gets the chance. She always enjoys seeing her friends to relive fond memories but worries when she has not heard from them for a while.

Her goals

Sandra’s goals are to keep finding meaningful companionship and to be as much a part of her family’s life as possible.

Sandra’s happiness is dependent on her ability to feel connected and relevant to the world through the relationships she has in it.

Explorations in ‘Sidelined and connected communities

We explore the future by looking for potential points of traction between this scenario of sidelined and connected communities and the needs of someone like Sandra. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or as spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

Find out how we ‘created the framework for future thinking’.
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01

Dignifight

Dignifight is a union style platform for organising activism for the elderly to reshape society so it accommodates them fairly. The platform provides activism tools and events that proactively enable the elderly to fight for their right to be respected in society.

Microaggression recording wearables track and monitor the lived experience of age discrimination to build evidence and their media machine communicates their fight with headlines such as ‘46% age pay gap for the elderly’.
The platform also offers partnerships with Re-training Schools, Universities and recruitment agencies designed specifically for the elderly to help them come out of retirement if they want to.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

Qualitime

Qualitime helps you track how everything you do influences your happiness and your life expectancy so that you can decide what is most important to you.

Find out how we ‘Conducted lab explorations’.
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02

Yolt

YOLT is an events organising algorithm that connects hosts, venues and people together to create amazing communities of diverse individuals.

It learns people’s preferences, and forms safe events around people’s common interests and provides activities and conversation starters that are appropriate to each group in order to connect people together across all demographics.
Once connected people grow their online network of friends so they can see what people are doing and evolve their own social groups.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

Yolt

Yolt is a community building app that orchestrates group meetings online and offline by matching people based on the potential quality of a conversation not simply based on being similarly minded.

Find out how we ‘Crafted future service concepts’.
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Emerging topics

In this set of explorations, we are asked to consider two ways in which disconnected and sidelined communities can reclaim their own power and connection to one another and to society. One that uses a union style strategy to bring together activists and organise in highly sophisticated ways and the second strategy that uses technology to match individuals with groups and facilitate new communities.

The first area of exploration uses sophisticated algorithms to get to know individuals that are isolated and then using that information it matches people to each other and initiates events and conversations to help transition people from isolated, anxious and perhaps vulnerable positions into more resilient communities. From this exploration, we can ask what it may mean to have communities facilitated by algorithms. Might it bring together new types of people that would otherwise not have connected? could that promote tolerance and acceptance or division? If all communities have their own identities – do algorithmically created groups and friends have a unique style? Do these communities need to be maintained by AI as well as initiated by them and if so does that mean the quality of the relationships is lesser? 

While these questions are based on the full unfolding of the concept, and while the concept still represents a potentially exciting way to reduce isolation, the explorations take the discussion around technologically enabled relationships up to a ‘community’ level where we can begin to explore how algorithms could intervene in fruitful or damaging ways having macro side-effects.

The second area of exploration revolves around the concept of activism and proposes a union style model that mobilises disempowered communities to act in organised ways to reach their goal. Protest may be a traditional means of making change but it’s organisation may become increasingly sophisticated. The internet could bring people together around common causes, wearables could help to portray people’s plight, social media can carry their message and their direct actions can be designed and organised to the greatest effect by platforms dealing solely in fighting injustice. What this represents is a potential emergence of services that build on clicktivism, crowdfunding and social media mobilisation by adopting new technologies and coordinating in new ways that bring more voice to people’s needs.

This particular exploration also raises topics around what an age inclusive society might mean and what impact societal relationships may have on people’s happiness. The inclusion of emotion sensing wearables as a weapon in the activists arsenal to document microaggressions not only translates the damage caused by inequality to the broader public but it also demonstrates the impact of transient, micro-relationships on people’s happiness. We may be able to quantify the true impact of the interactions we have as we pass on the streets and in the shops.

These explorations discuss our relationships at the community or societal level and introduce discussions around the role of technology in initiating community and potentially highlighting the impact of unhealthy societal tensions.

Related to ‘Spark’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Would you like to know more?

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

Spark

Your money fingerprint

People may expand their freedoms to live how they like and have the types of relationships they like in a more transient, but online world. New arrangements of relationships may be initiated, supported, or managed by AI, ushering in even more radical concepts of relationships.

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we illustrate conditions resulting from a selection of possible trends. We can foresee that there may be an increased sense of independent freedom of identity, allowing people to more fluidly define who they are and how they live, outside of more societally constructed norms such as gender, nationality, race, profession or sexuality. This could lead to a freedom to choose how you want to live as well as a freedom to explore and redefine yourself constantly. Within this context, we may see connections between each other alter, as more options for ways of being become available.

We see individuals living and working remotely, enabling them to continually move from place to place. This transience could be supported further by increasingly high fidelity online environments for socialising and working, which may use a plethora of virtual reality techniques to augment or generate digital worlds. This may mean relationships will fluctuate between physical and virtual spaces and be long or short term.

Alongside this emerging fluidity, we consider the integration of highly sophisticated, emotional AI into our lives in ways that will mean we can understand and communicate ourselves in totally new ways. This emotional understanding may influence the way that technology initiates and supports different types of relationships between people.

We consider 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 Lu?

For Lu, relationships are everything and can take any form. We explore how services may evolve around people’s new relational needs.

I feel good knowing my daughter’s family is ok… every time the phone rings I wish it was him. Sometimes I hear the phone ringing even when it’s not.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Enhanced relationships

People may expand their freedoms to live how they like and subsequently have the types of relationships they like in a more transient but online world. New arrangements of relationship may be initiated, supported, or managed by AI and usher in even more radical concepts of relationships.

Scenarios

Digital Childhoods

Children may spend more of their time in online environments that can transform their educational and creative experiences but equally have increased capacity to captivate and shape their world view in potentially problematic ways.

Lu travels around the world staying in hostels, hotels and co-living/working spaces cataloguing her adventures in her digital notebook. She lives for thrills, and believes that if something scares her, she needs to try it at least once. She opens up relationship apps whenever she gets to a new city, so she can get companionship and connection in different forms. When she’s alone, she logs into her online virtual worlds to socialise. Initiating relationships might be easy, but they can also lead to a lot of hassle ,so she tries to make the most of the connections she has.

Her happiness is shaped by the experiences she has through the people she meets, so she manages her relationships carefully across online and offline worlds.

Her goal

Lu’s goals are to constantly lean into her fear of change repeating things as little as possible, and while she wants to maintain her independence, she still wants to continue and make the most of her relationships.

For her, relationships are varied and complex, so the effort required has to balance with the value they gain from them.

Explorations in ‘Enhanced Relationships’

In this scenario, we explore the future by producing concepts of services that respond to the needs of someone like Lu. Sometimes these future concepts articulate provocative or even implausible caricatures of services, but provocation and implausibility often stimulate the dialogue that is needed for the emergence of new strategies.

  • What beneficial elements of these services could be fostered? What is already happening in some way?
  • What harm may these services do?
  • What might prevent services such as these proliferating?
  • What cultures may develop around a landscape of services such as this?
Find out how we ‘created the framework for future thinking’.
Read More
01

Relover

Relover is an implant designed to alter your vision, so you can see different faces mapped onto the people around you. This digital implant connects your visual system with our processors and is designed to augment and alter your view, allowing you to select how you want people to look. Choose people you know, adapt and tweak people’s actual appearance or opt for celebrities you’ve always wanted to meet.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

Eros

Eros is essentially a romantic relationship coach and assistant, wrapped into the convenience of an app.

Find out how we ‘Conducted studio explorations’.
Read More
02

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.

Relate learns your preferences and through its advanced matching techniques, initiates and arranges all of your ‘romantic’ relationships categories to reduce the complexity of modern connections.

Relate integrates with all user’s empathy devices, so there is always a shared understanding of each other’s expectations and desires.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Service Visions:

Yolt

YOLT is an events organising algorithm that connects hosts, venues and people together to create amazing communities of diverse individuals.
Find out how we ‘Crafted service concepts’.
Read More
03

Eros

Eros leverages artificial intelligence to enhance human-human romantic relationships for young adults already in them. This romantic relationship coach and assistant, wrapped into the convenience of an app, aims to help young adults learn more about themselves and their partners, so they are better able to build intimate, committed and passionate relationships in the present and future.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Service Visions

Child share

Child share is a matching system based on the needs, experiences and characters of parent types in order to create the perfect ongoing parental network for your child.

Emerging topics

Within these explorations, a multitude of topics emerge about how our relationships might be affected by such sophisticated technological methods of understanding ourselves and connecting to one another.

Firstly, we consider that if AI is able to understand the emotional states of individuals within a relationship to a more advanced level than it could without the technology, then this paves the way for new dynamics between people. We can ask whether a relationship that forms around such technology is natural or not? Whether it could extend unhealthy relationships that would otherwise have ended? Are there parts of our relationships that should purely be left unaided? Might these tools alter what we see in our relationships, and our perceptions of what is valuable and subsequently alter what a normal relationship is?

With concepts such as ‘Relate’, we see the extension of dating apps into complex relationship managers that revel in the emergence of atypical relationship structures and potentially divide relationships into services that fulfil different areas of people’s emotional and physical needs. We may see people having relationships that suit them specifically for different things like support, encouragement, sex or adventure. These relationships have an additional dimension added when we consider the possibility of virtual online relationships that could be enhanced through advanced virtual reality experiences.

If we consider an additional extension of virtual relationships, we can foresee a blurring between the existing sex industry and the emerging ‘relationship’ industry. If a person can digitally manifest across the world, then they can create experiences with multiple people at once, and therefore the relationship can be a commodity to whatever level of customised emotional or physical intimacy is called for. Consider a sex worker whose body, conversational style, vocabulary, and previous interactions can be collected and modelled in a virtual world. While this projection is not fully convincing of a world where artificial relationships can be realistically intimate and meaningful, one only needs to looks at the impacts of the current sex industry to argue that realism is not essential in order to impact how people form relationships.

Related to ‘Spark’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Would you like to know more?

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

Spark

Your money fingerprint

Children may spend more time in online environments that can transform their educational and creative experiences, but equally have increased capacity to captivate and shape their worldview in potentially problematic ways.

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we propose the continuation of a trend toward the ubiquity of technology in people’s lives. With the growth of AI and IoT, we may see digital and connected spaces integrated with most facets of life from childhood to old age. 

These technologies bring a huge new array of potential experiences to people, influencing how people parent their children. Technology may connect or diminish their relationship. It may support or contradict parenting values or principles and it may radically influence the way children engage with creativity and education.

We consider that digital services providers become ever more powerful through the advancement of virtual reality, behavioural economics, the application of psychological principles and the ever expanding plethora of available data about people. These may be the digital environments in which children spend their time.

In a negative light, these experiences may be captivating, and they may influence their behaviour or expose them to harmful ethical positions. While these digital environments may also have huge opportunities, they could well entail diminished parent  involvement, forcing us to consider how services may emerge that respond to the new parent-child dynamic.

We consider 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 Thomas?

Thomas’ relationship with work is about dedication. He believes that you get what you give and he wants to get the maximum. We explore how services may evolve around people’s new relationship with work.

I feel good knowing my daughter’s family is ok… every time the phone rings I wish it was him. Sometimes I hear the phone ringing even when it’s not.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Enhanced relationships

People may expand their freedoms to live how they like and subsequently have the types of relationships they like in a more transient but online world. New arrangements of relationship may be initiated, supported, or managed by AI and usher in even more radical concepts of relationships.

Scenarios

Digital Childhoods

Children may spend more of their time in online environments that can transform their educational and creative experiences but equally have increased capacity to captivate and shape their world view in potentially problematic ways.

Layla identifies herself first as a mother, but still values the other elements of her identity and worries about losing some of that. She is a new mum who prefers to live in a calm neighbourhood. She works part-time because she wants to spend most of her time with her little girl. Before she had her baby she was less present and in the moment, always getting lost in her phone and now she is already concerned about how entwined her child’s life is with digital services and how that might influence their relationship. 

Happiness, for Layla, is about finding stability at home. She wants to control her environment and ensure outside forces can’t damage what she has and she worries about having enough money to protect and provide for her child. 

Her goals

Layla’s goals are to get a small role in the local community to avoid getting disconnected from everything although her priority is always to have more time with her family. She wants to protect her child and help them grow up with clear and strong values.

For people like Layla, their number one relationship is with their children and their job in that relationship is to love and protect.

Explorations in ‘Digital childhoods’

We explore the future in this scene by looking for potential points of traction between this scenario of digital childhood and the needs of someone like Layla. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or as spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

Find out how we ‘created the framework for future thinking’.
Read More
01

Happy family

Happy family is a tool designed for your family that can track and censor every member’s digital activity and enhance digital safety and transparency.
By creating a shared account where every member connects its profiles and devices, Happy family tracks what types of content are influencing your children —and checks if it is in-keeping with your ‘family’ worldview and values.
It can also censor and adapt media and build in restrictions depending on the time and type of content for each child.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

Kinderpendent

Kinderpendent helps you understand how balanced your child’s online exposure is to challenging social topics and perspectives and manages that exposure through intelligent balancing and censorship tools and offers advice and support for parents and children while navigating big topics.

Find out how we ‘Conducted lab explorations’.
Read More
02

Empath

Empath is a VR educational tool designed to build tolerance and empathy by helping children understand some of the inaccuracies they hold in their prejudice.
By collecting analysis of social division or conflicts in the area around a school, it helps to direct the narrative children are shown through a customised selection of VR experiences. These experiences show children a new perspective about a true and relatable, contemporary story and offer students and teachers poignant follow-up questions to help children understand the relevance of the stories to their worldview.
The data links to the schools behaviour records to feed back impact data to local authorities and government policy creators.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

Empath

Empath assesses and builds student’s social intelligence and empathy for other people through in-school, personalised, immersive story-telling.

Find out how we ‘Crafted future service concepts’.
Read More
03

Playground

Playground offers a digitally augmented realworld playtime to enhance and encourage active imagination and defend a space for play in a cluttered world.

With Playground, children can build and draw in the real world with virtual tools and commands and share their playground with specific friends, so they can collaborate in real-time and create something new together. Kids can interact with insects, see the root systems of trees, create their own vehicles, climb up pyramids and share all their experiences with their parents and friends afterwards.

Playground offers a safe environment with a high level of protection from all other companies and, most importantly, gets your kids active!

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Service visions

Portal

Portal allows you to experience other people’s life experiences through VR and the people who live the experience for you.
04

Yaya

YaYa is your family’s digital network service that, connected to wearables and smart systems from your day to day life, helps parents get insights into their children’s mental health and emotional wellbeing.

YaYa uses data collected from children’s gadgets and wearables, along with inputs from parents, so it can become more personalised and set playful tasks and conversation starters that encourage mentally healthier habits and behaviour. The children earn ‘YaYa points’, which can be used to make real life purchases as a way to incentivise engagement.

Team:
Astha Johri
Kyle Macdonald
Shanshan Liu
Nayoon Lee
JIna Kim

05

Family Jar

FamilyJar responds to the insight that families do not share digital experiences. This means m that children spending their time in digital spaces become isolated from their families. Family Jar is a safe cloud environment where each family member can share things like a favourite song, an interesting news article or a photo from an amazing meal out.

FamilyJar encourages sharing between family members to produce a curated “Family Feed” that promotes positive inter-family relationships.

Team:
Emilia D’Orazio
Hyojin Bae
Yueh Ling (Irene)
Yushun Zhai

06

Integro

Integro is a service built to help gamers improve in-game and out of game well-being, based on a new rewards system. The service is connected to user wearables and game accounts that analyses and tracks the three most important variables for teenage development: sleep, physical activity, and social interaction. This data gives a ‘balance score’ based on personal optimisation across these variables. When the ‘balance score’ is too low, game play is paused. When it is good, users receive in-game or out-of-game rewards and are then connected to recommended activities and other Integro users.

Team:
Agata Juszkiewicz
Shuning Wang
Yi Long
Yuxin Lu

Emerging topics

In these scenarios, we propose a range of ways that parent-child relationships could change. There may be opportunities to expand how children explore the world and equally some interesting challenges about how children can be protected and kept healthy in increasingly online worlds.

We see potential services that make the most of VR either in educational or playtime settings that can be used to create previously unimaginable experiences. These could open children up to creativity in new collaborative environments, but raise questions about the extent to which play should be designed at all i.e. to what extent does supporting imagination weaken it? Alternatively, the technology could be used to build new types of education, like for empathy (in the exploration ‘Empath’), which could build community and tolerance in the world, but raises questions about validity and control of the values embedded within the services.

We propose a context where technology becomes even more integrated and present in children’s lives, which when considered alongside the increasing captological power of governments and commercial organisations, raises fears about the safety of unaccompanied children in online worlds and creates a social distance in the parent-child dynamic. With this problem in mind, we may see services emerge that seek to allow parents into a child’s online world. This could be by creating online spaces for them to share to prevent their isolation or by giving them a window onto what the child is exposed to and potentially even shaping that content. Questions emerge about what is safe for children and what is an intrusion into their personal space? If online environments are gaining power over their young users, how much power should parents be given? 

With a particular focus on the captivating nature of the games industry, we may see other services evolve to protect children that intervene without engaging the parent by using gaming methodologies to promote healthier online and offline habits and reduce addiction. These services represent an industry listening to a demand to be more responsible. 

These explorations portray a landscape of services that may emerge to manage the digitisation of children’s lives by supporting parenting or the parent-child relationship in different ways.

Related to ‘Spark’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Would you like to know more?

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

Spark

Your money fingerprint

In a world facing more and more turmoil and inequality, the super-rich may be held to account for their impact on the world and may be increasingly expected to use their wealth to support people who are disempowered or in peril.

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we work with the dramatic increase of inequality where the super rich amass wealth equivalent to some countries. We illustrate a scenario where it is publicly well known that a small group of people hold enough financial power to make key changes in the world, which  would drastically reduce injustice. They amass amounts of money that could eradicate malaria, reforest whole nations, restructure economies to be fairer and more sustainable, develop green infrastructure, create innovative green energy technologies and lift entire nations out of poverty. 

The absurdity of a situation where unelected individuals have the power to change the world to such an extent is amplified by increased global transparency, which could make public knowledge of the identity of these individuals, how they have come into wealth and what could be done with that wealth.

While the world watches these people gain their wealth, they may also watch a ruthless upturn of ecological systems that could disrupt huge swathes of civilisation by means of flooding, drought, mass extinction, mass migration and resource wars. The tension in this inequality may rise.

What might that mean for Adrian?

For Adrian, the value they take from their wealth is about their ability to live how they want and to invest it in ways that will express who they are. They want to make a mark on the world in a way that will reflect the strength of their character and their values rather than simply making money. We explore how services may evolve around people’s relationship with their wealth.

I feel good knowing my daughter’s family is ok… every time the phone rings I wish it was him. Sometimes I hear the phone ringing even when it’s not.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Enhanced relationships

People may expand their freedoms to live how they like and subsequently have the types of relationships they like in a more transient but online world. New arrangements of relationship may be initiated, supported, or managed by AI and usher in even more radical concepts of relationships.

Scenarios

Digital Childhoods

Children may spend more of their time in online environments that can transform their educational and creative experiences but equally have increased capacity to captivate and shape their world view in potentially problematic ways.

Adrian has spent the last 13 years of his life building a private airline brand. In the last year, he has searched for philanthropic opportunities for investing his wealth because his daughter lectured him about societal responsibility during the holidays after taking an ethics course. 

His happiness comes from knowing that his daughter will do well in life and that he has been a good father. He believes that people must achieve something every single day to feel useful. He does his utmost to stay busy, so he never dwells on an issue or gets annoyed. The biggest barrier to his happiness is a lack of time. He has created enough power to ensure his daughter will live well, but he’s concerned that the world won’t be worth living in by the time she gets older.

His goal:

Adrian’s goals are to use wealth and time wisely, and with a purpose, beyond just making more money. He also wants to align his business values with his own personal values. His happiness is dependent on impacting the world positively and not being seen simply as wealthy.

Explorations in ‘Wealth legacy’

We explore the future by producing service visions (i.e. concepts of service) that respond to the needs of someone like Adrian in the scenario of ‘Wealth legacy’. Sometimes, these service visions articulate provocative or even implausible caricatures of services, but provocation and implausibility often stimulate the dialogue that is needed for new strategies to emerge.

  • What beneficial elements of these services could be fostered? 
  • What is already happening in some way? 
  • What harm may these services do? 
  • What might prevent services such as these proliferating? 
  • What cultures may develop around a landscape of services such as this?
Find out how we ‘Learned from extreme users’.
Find out how we ‘Conducted lab explorations’.
01

V-Bay

Vbay is a crowdfunding platform where wealthy people can personally buy items that vulnerable people or humanitarian organisations require. You can build a profile and compare your actions to other people’s. You can also follow the impact you have made with one investment to fully ensure the intended transformation, perhaps through follow-up support and patronage.

As your relationships with groups develop, you are encouraged to share more than just financial resources and use the breadth of your powers to facilitate change in the world.

Our ‘Statue Server’ technology means that your achievements will remain forever for the world to see and remember.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

Qualitime

Qualitime helps you track how everything you do influences your happiness and your life expectancy so that you can decide what is most important to you.

Find out how we ‘Crafted future service concepts’.
02

Legacy

Legacy helps wealthy people understand the impact they have had on the planet and shares the ways they have had a positive impact.

By connecting to a large variety of data sources about your business, investments and personal life, Legacy is able to estimate in a coherent dashboard the ways that you may have negatively contributed toward global warming. It then supports you in making investments in the world that help bring you back to a neutral position. From then on, all your investments help you take your place among world leaders of environmental vitality. Legacy is your route to a clean conscience and a place in history as someone who helped the planet survive.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

Greencoin

Greencoin tracks your environmental impact. When you have a positive impact you earn Greencoin currency which can be spent on sustainable products.

Emerging topics

These explorations depict an environment where it is widely considered that wealth can often come at a cost to others or to the environment. In this context of extreme inequality and climate-change-turmoil, wealthy people may have to respond to greater public pressure to use their financial power with more responsibility. 

The services depicted encourage an egotistical response, offering to help people to repair damage caused to the world while elevating their public status. These services perpetuate neo-liberal, ‘silver-bullet’ ideas of international aid that frame the wealthy as heroes in a problematic way.

What is interesting about these explorations is that while wealth may still be adorned with a sense of glamour, it may well grow to be more widely considered as distasteful or obscene. These services frame a potential scenario where the brands of the wealthy (individuals or companies) may be increasingly driven to imbue ethical values and be forced to comply with them. We may see systems emerge to build transparency in commercial infrastructures and forensically monitor any claims made about the positive impact they have on the world.

While these systems are crude, if opposition to capitalism grows, then there may be mechanisms along these lines that act as some intermediate form of power shift during the potential turmoil of global economic restructuring.

Related to ‘Spark’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Would you like to know more?

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

Spark

Your money fingerprint

Decentralised infrastructures may be adopted by ‘smart’ localised communities to provide an escape route for those who feel that larger, more traditional infrastructures always work to entrap the public.

How the scenario could unfold

In this context, we observe and develop two potential trends. Firstly, we hypothesise that the sheer level of data collected about individuals and the increased capacity of organisations to cross-reference and analyse that data means that people’s behaviour can be largely predicted with great accuracy. In a background context of falling trust in governance structures, it’s plausible that people will feel less and less secure engaging with larger infrastructural systems, such as banks, because of the data they may collect and power they may wield in ways they don’t agree with.

Alongside this, we consider an emergence of decentralised and protected networks of resources for things like currencies —all enabled by new technologies such as blockchain. New capacities, such as localised power and communication infrastructures that coil, enable ‘networks’ of communities to live on their own systems and generally be as independent as possible from large, data consuming organisations.

What might that mean for Quetzali?

For Quetzali, independence is everything, but day-to-day life means getting tangled in controlling systems that she feels are ethically void. We explore how services may support her or bring even more complications.

I feel good knowing my daughter’s family is ok… every time the phone rings I wish it was him. Sometimes I hear the phone ringing even when it’s not.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Enhanced relationships

People may expand their freedoms to live how they like and subsequently have the types of relationships they like in a more transient but online world. New arrangements of relationship may be initiated, supported, or managed by AI and usher in even more radical concepts of relationships.

Scenarios

Digital Childhoods

Children may spend more of their time in online environments that can transform their educational and creative experiences but equally have increased capacity to captivate and shape their world view in potentially problematic ways.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Quetzali moved to London as a teenager with her mother. She works at an underground urban farm in an abandoned tube station beneath Clapham. She refuses to deal with banks as she feels they are just a means to subjugate the masses. She diligently avoids actions that will allow companies or the government to collect data about her, and goes to off-grid parties to meet other people and learn more about protecting her privacy.

Quetzali is happiest when her life is as self-sustained as possible. She doesn’t want to rely on others for her own wellbeing. She also is happy when she feels her decisions benefit the environment, such as cycling or shopping locally from people she gets to know personally. She believes nothing is more important than her freedom.

Her goal:

Quetzali wants to be able to be able to live on her own terms away from any oversight. She wants to make the world a better place and to live sustainably at the very least.

Questzali’s struggle rests in her dependence on systems that increasingly require details about who she is, which she believes would eventually infringe on her freedom.

Explorations in ‘Connected localism’

We explore the future by producing service visions (i.e. concepts of services) that respond to the needs of someone like Quetzali in the scenario of ‘Connected localism’. Sometimes these future concepts articulate provocative or even implausible caricatures of services, but provocation and implausibility often stimulate the dialogue that is needed for the emergence of new strategies.

  • What beneficial elements of these services could be fostered? 
  • What is already happening in some way? 
  • What harm may these services do? 
  • What might prevent services such as these proliferating? What cultures may develop around a landscape of services such as this?
Find out how we ‘Learned from extreme users’.
Read More
01

Off-Chain

Offchain is a toolkit for smart localisation that allows its communities to connect and access modernity without having to forgo their data privacy. Offchain promotes sustainable living through local currencies, transparency in trading, local energy grids, general resource sharing and closed loop systems —helping smaller towns and villages be as smart and sophisticated as any metropolis.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

Greencoin

Greencoin tracks your environmental impact. When you have a positive impact you earn Greencoin currency which can be spent on sustainable products.

Emerging topics

From this exploration we can infer that open source, online groups may develop more and more services that can enable the independence of communities. The example demonstrates how technology could one day be used to facilitate hyper local currencies that support local economies and cultures. However, services may also develop in other arenas like energy, food or transport, meaning that communities may reap the benefits of digitised society without having to forgo any freedoms or have their privacy encroached upon. These technologies may remain local and particular combinations of digital services may lead to nuanced and localised digital cultures and we may see services begin to accommodate these new community identities. 

If these practices were to grow, we may see   larger companies trying to recapture some of these spaces by creating larger scale platforms that maintain reasonable levels of privacy, ownership and independence while returning some value to their own organisation. In this instance, we might see a new sophistication of public understanding around data privacy and the implications of less transparent systems, which may advance markets into more honest territories.

Together, these types of shifts could lead to a healthier balance of power between organisations or governments and the people they serve. We may see increased levels of transparency, responsibility, and individual ownership of data.

Related to ‘Spark’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Would you like to know more?

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

Spark

Your money fingerprint

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives, it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

How the scenario could unfold

In this hypothetical environment, we consider that governments may explore new ways to deliver welfare to people to reduce poverty and inequality and to offset the potential harm done to employment from the growth of artificial intelligence and other tumultuous developments in the job market. In this process, they will be looking at new systems to assess needs and deliver services that benefit people in different ways

In conjunction with this trend, we focus on the expansion and sophistication of artificial intelligence into the field of human emotion. We also examine how a meaningful and quantifiable assessment of a person’s emotional state may influence services. We explore with a particular focus on what might be plausible if emotional states are cross-referenced with financial information. Services employing psychological theories deep within their designs would be given vast new capacities to empower or exploit users or simply to understand and customise to their needs in alternative ways.

We consider 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 Mary?

For Mary, life is constantly defined by a financial system that incarcerates her and her family. We explore how services may evolve around people’s needs in this context.

I feel good knowing my daughter’s family is ok… every time the phone rings I wish it was him. Sometimes I hear the phone ringing even when it’s not.

Mary shares a small two bed flat arranged by the housing office with her husband and three small kids. She and her husband work everyday full-time: he works as a security guard and she as a shoe shop assistant. They had a little debt and then her husband suffered a work injury on a building site. He was on benefits until the rules changed and now they can not afford to keep up payments. It’s hard to explain to her friends and colleagues the situation they’re in and how it happened.

Happiness for Mary would be the chance to get herself and her loved ones out of this position and function as a proper family. She wants to be able to breathe and have fun and escape the constant concern about food or bills or being cut-off by the government. When her mum brings sweets round for the kids or when she finds little ways to make them laugh, she sees glimpses of a positive future.

Her goals:

Mary’s goals are to get out of debt and be a ‘normal’ family and to live a normal life. Just to have dignity, privacy and space for her family.

For her, a lack of money stunts almost every element of her life and is a constant cause for concern.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Enhanced relationships

People may expand their freedoms to live how they like and subsequently have the types of relationships they like in a more transient but online world. New arrangements of relationship may be initiated, supported, or managed by AI and usher in even more radical concepts of relationships.

Scenarios

Digital Childhoods

Children may spend more of their time in online environments that can transform their educational and creative experiences but equally have increased capacity to captivate and shape their world view in potentially problematic ways.

Explorations in ‘Emotional money’

We explore the future by producing service visions that respond to the needs of someone like Mary in the scenario of ‘Emotional money’. Sometimes, these service visionsarticulate provocative or even implausible caricatures of services, but provocation and implausibility often stimulate the dialogue that is needed for the emergence of new strategies.

  • What beneficial elements of these services could be fostered? What is already happening in some way?
  • What harm may these services do?
  • What might prevent services such as these proliferating?
  • What cultures may develop around a landscape of services such as this?
Find out how we ‘created the framework for future thinking’.
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01

UBH

UBH is a universal government benefits system, which evolved from universal basic income, due to the recognition that happiness is the most important metric for success. Through advanced emotional monitoring, the government can support people with whatever services or community engagement they need to reach an acceptable level of happiness. Unhappiness leads to far greater costs in the end.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

Spark

Spark is a service that helps you discover your financial personality to align it with your consumption and help you make better financial decisions and achieve financial health and wellbeing.

Find out how we ‘Conducted studio explorations’.
Read More
02

Little Things

A platform that rewards people who bring micro-doses of happiness to others, so that whatever you bring to the world doesn’t go unnoticed.

By paying a small amount daily, people subscribe to the service to get a little extra attention or a smile walking down the street. Providers can see the profile of the users and are alerted to what sort of positivity they want, when and where. Each ‘little’ interaction is automatically rated based on sensors on the users. Providers get paid and build a reputation for authenticity.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Service Visions

YOLT

YOLT is an events organising algorithm that connects hosts, venues and people together to create amazing communities of diverse individuals.
Find out how we ‘Crafted service concepts’.
Read More
03

Guru

Guru helps you build your well being using your money. First, it connects your banks to Guru and gets to know you through a short personality test. It shows you all of your financial information in customisable ways that help you understand how your spending is connected with your wellbeing. Next, it gives you bitesize tips on how to use your money to reach your wellbeing and financial goals in different ways. And finally, it reinforces positive progress toward your goals. Collectively it creates a learning loop that helps you align your financial behaviours with what makes you happiest.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

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.

Emerging topics

Through these explorations, we see interesting new types of service emerge from multiple types of perspective. —all engaging with money in emotional ways.

The least provocative of the three explorations represents a type of service that could exist in the shorter term, which begins to normalise the combination of emotion and money. It uses  it to build someone’s agency by helping them recognise positive outcomes from their spending. While this dynamic still has potential for corruption, it is an example of a way that artificial intelligence can be used to create awareness and therefore make the most of your  money.

Another emerging topic is about how t happiness metrics could be used as a way to define the need for a service and the subsequent value of an experience (as shown in Little Things and ‘Universal Basic Happiness). While such extreme examples are unlikely, they frame an emerging space where less complex services may use emotional ratings to determine the need, and therefore the cost that someone should be paying, or even determine their rights to access certain services. While the rating of people’s emotional experience is hugely controversial and unveiling in it’s own right, in combination with financial transactions, we might begin to see unusual metrics such as the cost of happiness. Which may unveil an interesting new understanding of the human condition – Who is happiest? How much does it cost? What is the true relationship between happiness and money?

In all these services, there are consistent threats. What happens when the happiness algorithms get it wrong (as they would do during their early juvenile states, at the very least)?. If they determine your understanding of what makes you happy in incorrect ways, what level of authority will they have in people’s mind? Will people consequently make incorrect decisions that aren’t right for them? Will people’s understanding of happiness be affected? What happens if the provider of the service is corrupt or if the service is  just trained by data that is biased towards certain types of experience and might, for instance, benefit certain commercial or political entities disproportionately?

More than most, these scenarios represent a particularly treacherous convergence of worlds. Technologies that begin to get under the skin of people’s mental mechanisms combined with the corrupting influence of money, marks the emergence of a complex and dangerous new territory. Some of the more palatable services here demonstrate how light hearted excursions may carve easy new routes into that territory.

Related to ‘Spark’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Would you like to know more?

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

Spark

Your money fingerprint

Pyro has the best access to the latest and safest physical and mental augmentations on the market. As soon as these products and services are on the market, you can get them from us.

What is the problem?

In the future, we will possibly see a continuation of the integration between people and technology. It may get to the point where we start to see it cross a boundary into our bodies for purposes that go well beyond a medical need. People are already deeply dependent on digital technology to monitor and tune large aspects of their life, but a lot of these services require active input from the user. In the future, we may find more technology around, on and even in us, that monitors everything from gut health to social dynamics. In addition to this model that  simply collects massive amounts of data and feeds useful information to people, these technologies may begin to directly intervene in our physical being.

In this context, we can describe two potential issues and their interconnection.

  • Firstly, if technologies become available, and they enable some people to perform professionally, physically, emotionally or socially at ‘higher’ levels than those without the technology, we may see divisions between people. 
    • Particularly, those who have access to these augmentations will likely be more privileged or wealthier than those who do not. 
    • The divide will only continue to grow as augmented people become more employable, earn more money and augment even further. People left out may find themselves trailing or working with inferior augmentations or being forced into using labour based augmentations, and people at the high end may find themselves in a kind of arms race.
  • Secondly, there may well be issues with the public health response to these devices because the regulatory bodies required to approve or disprove them may simply be built on biomedical ideas of safety and may be limited in their capacity to consider the holistic effects of augmentation.

How Pyro responds

Pyro responds by offering the widest selection of cutting edge products in one environment where all the products have been rapidly and rigorously tested by a large panel of independent experts. In this way, Pyro gives people a complete view of all the products that are available and that can be relied on, ensuring that when they make such a large commitment they are doing so with full confidence and full access to experts and peers for support. People can compete in the world and augment their ambition, safely.

Reliable Reviewing System:
Pyro understands the dilemma people face with these new products and only offers products that have been comprehensively tested by their independent panel of reviewers. The panel of over 1000 reviewers from all demographics overcome the biases of the regulator and give first hand experience of the offerings rather than simply the biomedical impacts of a service. Pyro gives people assurance that they are making the right decision when they commit to a product they may be living with for years to come, but it also gives them that information faster than any other provider so they can always stay ahead of the competition.

Optimised Nutrition:
Pyro has an expanding collection of nutritional support offerings. For instance, ‘Bioview’ is a system consisting of an app and a body-powered camera that sits inside a person’s digestive tract. It analyses the contents of people’s gut, their biome and the overall condition of their system. The information is relayed to their AI system to assess their digestive health at any given moment. ‘BioView’ integrates perfectly with ‘Youtrition’, which is a more holistic service that assesses someone’s genetic predisposition to diseases and constantly monitors their hormones. This data, works in conjunction with it’s semi permanent skin patch, which can deliver the correct complement of vitamins and minerals through the skin.  It can also integrate with their personal food services like UberEATS and FoodDirect to administer whatever is needed through people’s food to not only avoid disease but to keep them operating at their optimum all the time!

Deeply mental rest:
Pyro now has two products available that simply optimise the natural brain rejuvenating potential of sleep and meditation. ‘Samsa’ and ‘Spectre’ both use technologies that listen carefully to people’s mental activity as they try to sleep or meditate and delicately reciprocate with corresponding electrical signals, which help them enter rejuvenating sleep and mediation states on a far deeper level far quicker. While it is recommended that people use this to optimise their existing habits, it can also be used for those times when people simply don’t have the time for a full night’s sleep.

Social tools:
‘Relate’ is the first in the range of accessible social augmentations. It is a smart memory and recollection superpower. ‘Relate’ is an add-on to eyewear that has facial recognition, which combines with a conversation decoder and someone’s operating system to remember names and interesting facts as well as any other relevant information about the people they are around. It then gives them prompts the next time they see those people. They are never let down by their memory and can always be at their best.

Find out how we did a ‘backcasting of the value propositions’.
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Jump to:

Service visions

Digital Twin

Digital Twin is a tool used to measure real life activities and create a virtual projection of what could happen if you behave outside your routine and patterns.

What we
learnt

We demonstrated Pyro to users who had used technologies and products to improve their physical, mental or professional lives to a large extent and this is what we learned:

 

  • Our users’ general responses to this concept and it’s enclosed offerings were a mixture of excitement and curiosity with large amounts of hesitancy and concern.
  • To them and the people we explore this concept with, the proposition represents a world that they still see as fictional and highly problematic. But when considered as though it were real, people often overcome their aversion and imagine positive contexts in which they would engage with the services. 

Emerging areas of interest around this proposition are about:

  • what is required for people to overcome distrust of new technologies such as this; and,
  •  what they might mean for authenticity or employment.
Find out how we ‘Discussed the implications of the prototypes’.
Read More

01

Scared but willing

One of the most interesting symbols that emerge from this experiment is that most of the participants expressed discomfort with the concepts, but all of them felt that they would try them to some degree. A lot of the hesitations that people describe are as you would expect —They are concerned with permanence, side-effects, losing control by sharing their data, ideas of fairness etc. Some people had strong aversions to some of these concepts. However, even with these strong feelings, they often explained conditions under which it would be acceptable to them. For instance, if friends were doing the same thing, if there were safety assurances or if the pay-offs were high. Ultimately, some users described how their existing aversion would likely fade if the concepts became more accepted by people around them.

In some instances, they gave examples of using other performance enhancing offerings that they had previously held concerns about. This is a clear example of how people’s fears of drastically different futures may only be a temporary obstacle to the emergence of these technologies. Participants seemed frustrated that they can’t manage and control themselves exactly the way they want to in order to be who they want to be. If a service can help them get closer, they may overcome their concerns.

02

Influence on work

An area of discussion that this proposition rapidly presents is about these augmentations’ implications on work and on employment. People describe how the augmentations may help people progress professionally, but that in competitive industries those people may end up being required to augment themselves in order to maintain and perform or indeed to continue climbing a hierarchy. In turn, this creates a counter presentation to the idea that these products may bring people power and choice. On the other end of the spectrum, the people ‘below the API’, who may not have the means to access augmentations may find themselves less competitive in the job market and could even end up agreeing to be augmented by companies in order to work. In this circumstance, we are forced to examine more closely where the lines should be drawn between ourselves as people and ourselves as employees or as useful assets.

03

Authenticity and fairness

All participants also described a fear about the degradation of authenticity should these products become more ubiquitous. People described concern about the struggle that may ensue understanding which elements of a person are truly them and which are parts of a service they ascribe to (the same sentiment was expressed with physical capabilities( . There is seemingly a sense of unfairness and exclusivity about the availability of the augmentations that fractures people’s fundamental expectations of everyone they encounter in the world. Would this be diminished if everyone could simultaneously receive the same upgrades? At what point will our technologically enabled capabilities define us as transhuman?

Jump to

Propositions

Edit

Edit is a lifestyle service that helps you edit things in and out of your life through enriched tracking and mini-experiments.

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.

Our new direction of exploration

If this proposition is progressed, the strategic question of relevance to our investigations is more along the lines of:

When trans-humanising products and services are readily available, where will their case be most compelling? How might the public discourse emerge? What might be considered acceptable? And how can people’s happiness be ensured?

Related to ‘Spark’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Would you like to know more?

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

Let's Talk!

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