Emotional money

Overlapping emotional and financial value

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.

We don’t have much room to be a normal family… cooking, playing, or doing homework together. I just get on with it because I have other people relying on me everyday.

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

Sidelined and connected communities

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

Scenarios

Pragmatic collectives

Distrust in the ability of governments and large organisations to offer genuine solutions to pressing issues may result in the adoption of individual action organised around new models of ethical priorities and infrastructures.

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’.
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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’.
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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 ‘Emotional Money’

Scenarios

Connected localism

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.

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.

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.

Emotional money

Overlapping emotional and financial value

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’.
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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 ‘Emotional Money’

Scenarios

Connected localism

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.

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.

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.

Emotional money

Overlapping emotional and financial value

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.

What is the problem

Yolt responds to the potential increase of the already dire condition of social isolation in the UK, particularly amongst the elderly. It also simultaneously responds to divisions in society brought about by populism and social media bubbles. 

In terms of social isolation, people describe feeling less capable of forming new connections to each other. We can foresee that UK society may grow further toward being fundamentally geared for younger generations, regardless of the ageing of the general population. A reduction of welfare coupled with this societal inaccessibility could leave increasing numbers of elderly people further isolated, leading to poorer health, diminished community and further unhappiness.

longside this projection, we speculate that another trend may continue. We propose that due to the ‘bubble effects’ of social media and a potential growth in populist politicians, people may have more polarised views and less willingness to listen and be open to other people’s perspectives. In this scenario, we could see communities disintegrate further, with people feeling increasingly isolated, and public consensus and camaraderie becoming less and less possible.

How ‘Yolt’ responds

Yolt offers anybody who would value an increased sense of community the ability to connect with people who share the same need. It connects people based on opportunities that Yolt perceives as being potential spaces for healthy and meaningful conversation. These conversations are curated and guided by the context (i.e. the space) and group dynamics of the people it aims to bring together (people’s interests, the number of people, previous experiences with Yolt) and by the conversation starters and conversation curation that it offers to the dynamic between people. Yolt connects people that may otherwise have considered each other to be incompatible, thus expanding people’s perception of their own ability to access a community, companionship or even common ground.

Quickly helps you meet people:
Yolt shows you people in the area who are interested in topics that might interest you offering you an easy way to get involved straight away.

Stimulates conversation about important topics:
When you share topics on your profile that interest you, Yolt links you to other people who have related and diverse thinking and initiates conversation instantly.

Matches you with people you should know:
Yolt gradually learns about who you really are through AI powered personality assessments and matches you with people you would get along with, and with people who it is important to get along with.

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 Yolt to high-need users and this is what we learned:

  • The discussion that emerges around this proposition focuses mainly on the plausibility of being able to create digital tools that in turn create a positive dynamic and culture between people who may not have the same views.
  • Although our participants hoped t it could be possible, they expressed that it would be immensely powerful and could reshape people’s perspectives of society, reducing isolation and division.
  • As a broader issue, a larger set of questions emerged around what it might mean for our communities and our relationships if technology begins to have more sway in orchestrating them.

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.

01

Comfortable disagreement not conflict

The main area of discussion arising from this concept was about the issues foreseen in its implementation. Most people felt sceptical that a service could create the right kind of culture where people didn’t interpret disagreement as conflict. People felt that although the app’s mechanisms to bring people together were really exciting, the idea of connecting people based on differences of opinion could be problematic, and that doing so in a group setting would be really challenging as group dynamics are often more intimidating for people. While the proposition makes allowances for this by learning about people before,during and after their interactions with other people, this would nonetheless be the biggest issue.

People were positive about the ideology of bringing people together in an environment where disagreements could be voiced and listened to. But everyone felt that they had not been heard and that others wouldn’t listen to them, with many people openly describing political correctness as being a confusing, inaccessible, judgmental and isolating force. It is clear that for a proposition like this to work, the principles of those services would have to be ingrained and upheld in as much user behaviour as possible.

In essence, the perception is that it would be overwhelmingly difficult to orchestrate an online or offline culture that would prevent users’ interactions from becoming conflicting and would likely create conflict and unpleasant experiences.

02

Tech changes culture

The counterargument to this claim is that the culture of existing, purely digital, social media platforms have created a climate that heightens the more combative elements of our, very natural human behaviours. If these environments are capable of influencing our interactive habits in this way, then surely this is evidence that, with the right design, they can indeed be redirected toward more constructive cultures.

03

Potential inauthenticity and distortion

Another discussion point around this proposition looks at it assuming that it can do exactly what it describes —bring people together and curate conversation that enables people to feel listened to and understood, even if not agreed with, and in this point we assume that this effective proposition would be adopted on a large scale – within this parameter we ask questions about the possibility of distorted public opinion and inauthenticity.

As with other propositions of this nature, there is nothing decidedly new about the idea of technology coordinating interactions between people, but what it alludes to is another more concerning progression —if large parts of our communities are brought together based on algorithms, and even those interactions and conversations are orchestrated based on algorithm design —we may be creating conditions for larger scale distortion of our ways of interacting. In turn, we may begin to question the authenticity of the interactions we have with other people. The question is, if a singular (albeit sophisticated) algorithm should flourish as a means of arranging our interactions, particularly around societal topics, could this be corrupted or have other effects of a similar calibre of existing social media (which often break down discussion)?

Find out how we ‘Discussed the implications of the prototypes’.
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jump to

Propositions

Eros

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

Propositions

Empath

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

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:

How might we create online and offline social platforms that orchestrate preferred interpersonal dynamics and culture?

Related to ‘Emotional Money’

Scenarios

Connected localism

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.

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.

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.

Emotional money

Overlapping emotional and financial value

Eros is essentially a romantic relationship coach and assistant, wrapped into the convenience of an app. The five features are aim to help young adults learn more about themselves and their partners, so they are better at to building intimate, committed, passionate relationships

What is the problem?

Problems with relationships are not new and maybe they should not be eradicated because  a problem in a relationship could be a meaningful and natural cue to move on. But while the drive to be in love and the desire for some level of commitment to our relationships is innately human and has not changed, much about our dating cultures has. People often connect and communicate through technology, relationship structures, dynamics and cultures are shifting dramatically. So, within this new landscape, the problems we see in relationships  —around intimacy (trust and closeness), commitment (effort and dedication), and passion (excitement and longing) — can perhaps be approached in new ways, alleviating the difficulties and helping people grow in their relationships.

Alongside the fact that relationships can inherently create problems for people, the cultural shift in relationship norms means that while there is more relationship choice, there is less capacity to navigate it.

How ‘Eros’ responds

Eros is a relationship app that stimulates reflection, conversation and new experiences with your partner so you can grow in love. Relationships take work, but it doesn’t have to feel that way.

Discover exercises:
Eros begins to develop a routine of asking questions to each person in the relationship to promote reflection about themselves, their partner and their relationship

Relationship goals:
Actions build memories, and memories are what count. But, life is busy so it’s easy to let great ideas for dates, trips, and romantic gestures get lost in the shuffle of everyday life. Relationship Goals help people get inspiration and also keep track of what they want to do for and with each other.

Mood tracking calendar:
Through manually inputting their mood each individual in the relationship will be able to build a record of their mental state over a period. Over time, these patterns can be correlated to the people you were with and the experience you had with them, helping you to learn about yourself and what influences your relationship.

Past and future memory collection:
Through a shared library that can collect multiple types of media associated with events i.e. photos, messages, videos, audio, location tags etc. Eros builds a digital collection of significant past events and enables the couple to build and envision future events that they both look forward to in their shared futures.

Support resources:
For when times get hard, there are other resources that help you as an individual or as a couple to work through a situation. Eros offers connection to relationship coaches and therapists, a network of peers and also has the option for you to record your own lessons for yourself so that in times of need you can take your own advice.

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

What we
learnt

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

  • We found that people saw huge value in a series of features within Eros that enabled them to more practically engage with the dynamics of their relationships. 
    • This would mean they could overcome issues that could otherwise become larger than necessary. 
    • It would ultimately enable people to protect what they want to protect about a relationship and learn about themselves preventing unnecessary damage. 
  • The only counter sentiments to this were in regard to:
    • feeling guarded about the boundaries between a service and a relationship or its individuals, 
    • what it meant for the authenticity of a relationship if its culture and dynamics were altered or upheld by the service  —an attitude summarised by the question – ‘What does it mean about the person that you’re with if they need an app to make the relationship work?’, or ‘At what point does a person’s dependence on technology to sustain a relationship, suggest that the relationship shouldn’t work?’

Jump to:

Service visions

Eros

Eros leverages artificial intelligence to enhance human-human romantic relationships for young adults already in them.
Find out how studio teams ‘built their prototypes’.

01

Romance vs Management

One area of discussion emerging from the research is that there seems to be a sense that the management and maintenance of a relationship is counter to romance. As a consequence, people sometimes feel obliged to ‘maintain’ those relationships in less methodical ways in favour of giving the sense that it is effortless. This dynamic means that people are reluctant to use other tried and tested means to enrich and strengthen relationships. Something as simple as a list of relationship goals or learning about how your mood influences your relationship may seem fine in a professional setting, but less so in a relationship. In this instance, Eros seems to give all parties in a relationship the permission to apply these tools and heuristics without it damaging a sense of romance, therefore helping people overcome very natural and common human failings, like simple forgetfulness.

02

Support vs Authenticity

Another important area of discussion is that this service began to emerge as a service that is more suited to relatively young relationships, so perhaps a relationship younger than 4 or 5 years. This is an indicator that the service might help couples to learn from each other and learn how to be with each other. In some way, this inherently leads to the shaping of the culture of a relationship and the behaviours of people within it. Some users suggested that they found this may challenge the other individual’s sense of authenticity because of the influence of the app on their behaviour and the genuineness of the relationship. Some felt it may even keep unhealthy relationships together (although the service includes mechanisms to prevent this).

It is easy to jump to a somewhat dystopian idea that this projected future could lead to a world of ubiquitous relationships, which are all strong and weak in the same areas because an algorithm has a preferred dynamic for relationships. t However, it is a valid theme to be exploring —What are the characteristic dynamics of romantic, human relationships that are positive, and which are negative? and according to whom?

03

There are boundaries

Among the feedback from participants, there was a consistent request for the app to remain at some distance. While in this proposition the app’s role was encouraged and already fairly intimately connected to a relationship, elements of its presence seem to go too far, appearing to overstep on things too personal. This was not necessarily connected to areas such as sexual intimacy, but instead to suggestions regarding particular behaviours within relationships where a participant may feel that the behaviour is connected to their identity. Ultimately, this type of service needs to learn to navigate each person individually based on their personal boundaries or it needs to keep a distance overall.

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.

Propositions

Empath

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

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:

How might the use of technology to enable people already in romantic relationships to build more satisfying relationships influence relationship cultures and how neutral should this service be?

Team
Alison Maggioncalda
Beibei Sun
Min Huang

Related to ‘Emotional Money’

Scenarios

Connected localism

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.

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.

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.

Emotional money

Overlapping emotional and financial value

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

What is the problem?

In the future we may see young children spending increasing time online. If this is simultaneously matched by the continued growth of power that technology companies have in terms  of  persuading and influencing people through their online experiences, then we could argue that in the future companies will have an increased capacity to shape the worldview of many young people. Currently, parents are able to instill and share their own values with their children as they come across challenges together in the physical world by helping them navigate decisions and understand issues. However, within this online space it is currently difficult for parents to raise their children in the same way because those digital lives are opaque and not shared experiences. Therefore, in the future, parents may have to respond and protect their children’s values and perspectives to prevent large companies having unprecedented sway over people.

How ‘Kinderpendent’ responds

Tools to help parents parent online by explaining content to children that conflicts with their values rather than simply allowing or censoring it.

Learn parent’s values:
Kinderpendent listens to what’s important to parents and what concerns them about the dangers of online activity and the complex perspectives their child is exposed to, so that it can tune the priorities of its content management.

Show the balance of media content the child sees online:
Through AI analysis of all connected devices, Kinderpendent understands the representations your  child is seeing of particular issues and if it is distorted and out of line with your own beliefs and shares this with you, the parents.. Kinderpendent doesn’t show you specific content is shown in order to protect the privacy of the child.

Choose how to respond to imbalances:
When there is an imbalance of content misrepresenting issues that are important to the parent, they are able to promote stories they are in favour of, decrease content they think is harmful, supplement what they see with other information or look for advice from other parents.

Balancing and censorship tools:
It means parents can do more than just block out things they disagree with —through an array of tools people are able to ensure that their children are not being shown an unquestioned perspective of the world. Whether it is sexism or racism, we help you raise the discussion.

Awareness rising:
Through non-intrusive means, we are able to make children aware  that not everything they see online is fair or appropriate. For example, a fridge magnet word-game targeting girls, may advertise to a girl using only stereotypical words such as ‘rainbow’, ‘flowers’ and ‘unicorn’. If this were a problem for a parent because they felt it conditions stereotypical views, Kinderpendent could  explain what that means to the child when the parent is not around.

Advice and support for tackling big topics together and phasing out:
Through a comprehensive collection of conversation tools parents are helped to open conversation with their child about big topics and clearly explain what they feel.

Find out how we did a ‘backcasting of the value propositions’.
Read More

What we
learnt

We demonstrated a low fidelity prototype of this to high-need users, who in this case were parents of children with intensive digital lives, to investigate their response and this is what we learned:

  • In general, we found that most parents struggled with finding a balance in diligence, feeling that it is important to allow freedom to their children, but simply giving free reign felt negligent. 
  • With the prospect of their children spending an increased amount of time in online spaces, they felt less equipped to do their job as parents. 
  • We also found that although the parent is traditionally the main source of guidance, there are issues in granting further power and authority because, for a variety of reasons, their judgement is not perfect and to an extent, children need to be protected from their parents.

Jump to:

Service visions

Happy family

Happy family is a tool designed for your family. It can track & censor every member’s digital activity.

Find out how we ‘Discussed the implications of the prototypes’.
Read More

01

Online Parenting

The first thing that arose out of the research with parents was that there is a clear problem. For parents, the increased amount of time that children spend online, the breadth of their experiences and environments they engage with online exposes them to a plethora of issues, content and perspectives, which the parent will have no idea or no role, in —unless they intervene, censor content and experiences i or rely on the child to come to them and report. None of which are equivalent to a model where a parent is broadly (at specific ages) present and has control over the things a child is exposed to, mediating as they see fit. As children spend more time in online spaces, they simply cannot be parented in the same way, leaving parents concerned and at a loss with fairly basic mechanisms that they find insufficient. Some of them speak of this solution as a more sophisticated middle ground, which helps them parent and support their children without needing to be permissive or too authoritarian.

02

Parents aren’t perfect

While it is clear that some parents would greatly welcome having additional tools at their disposal, a clear discussion that emerged from the research is that, while there is no right or wrong way of parenting, there is concern for these tools to be used inappropriately. Parents talked about their partners having extreme views or not respecting a child’s privacy. So, we raise the perspective that while these tools do potentially help parents protect their children from societal biases, or commercial and political agendas, what means are there to protect children from their parents?

03

Child focused

It could be argued that should this coercive threat be realised, then it may be an inappropriate response to make the power struggle a battle between organisations and parents and to take that battle to the child’s device. Perhaps, it would be preferable to look for policy interventions to counter organisational threats. If the battle has to arrive at the child’s device, then a more child-focused approach may be more enabling. A service that engages children with value for them (and centres on the internal growth and learning of a child to understand multiple perspectives and build their own views) would surely be a more resilient offering. However, the question remains —under whose authority and guidance should a child’s perspective be defended and nurtured?

jump to

Propositions

Empath

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

Propositions

Mobible

Mobible is a chatbot that helps connect your faith with you, your life and your community based on church teachings and knowledge decoded from the scripture.

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:

If there is an increase in opportunity for external actors to shape children’s values online, how do we protect children fairly?

Related to ‘Emotional Money’

Scenarios

Connected localism

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.

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.

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.

Emotional money

Overlapping emotional and financial value

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

What is the problem?

In the future, it’s possible that we may see a proliferation of populism and an increased use of divisive politics to maintain power. These tactics may be amplified by social media, which can drive the public into social bubbles formed only of people with similar beliefs. This may entail people rarely interacting with those who disagree with them or who have had different experiences. The subsequent effect may be that we find tolerance fades and social cohesion begins to weaken.

How ‘Empath’ responds

Build empathy in classrooms through VR experiences with assessment & discussion, and regional data analysis, government, employer, and charity selected topics

Understand social tension:
Empath analyses forms of social division or conflicts in the county based on policing data, public social media content and school reporting mechanisms. This information is used to direct the different perspectives of life that children are shown in class.  The content is curated alongside academic experts, governments, employers, charities, and diverse groups of the public.

VR experiences of other lives:
Students then have customised (but non-specific) VR experiences that immerse them in someone else’s scenario to invoke deeper empathy and help them to understand other perspectives. The stories are based on true and relatable contemporary stories curated by experts and prioritised based on the issues in the area.

In-Class Assessment & Discussion:
There is then a series of short assessment questions that encourage deeper immersion and follow-up discussions. The aim is to provoke conversation and help children understand the relevance of the stories in the context of  their own worldview.

Get a qualification:
After a while, and as part of school curricula, social intelligence becomes a valuable, sought-after skill for future employment and students can even continue to train more deeply in the subjects which divide people.

Find out how we did a ‘backcasting of the value propositions’.
Read More

What we
learnt

We demonstrated a low fidelity prototype of this to high-need users, who in this case were teachers, to investigate their response —this is what we learned:

  • We found that people saw a great potential to use virtual reality technology to promote empathy amongst children, which could genuinely lead to societal tolerance and cohesion.
  • However,many issues still surround the proposition, particularly around the curation of the messaging behind the experiences provided to children.

Other emerging discussions from this proposition are around who would benefit the most from increased empathy, and how such a potentially transformative service could be authentically produced and responsibly and safely administered:

service visions

Empath

Empath is an VR educational tool that helps children understand inaccuracies they hold in their prejudice.
Find out how we ‘Discussed the implications of the prototypes’.
Read More

01

Children’s Empathy or Parents’ Empathy

The most striking point that arose from the proposition was that teachers felt that the issue with empathy lay with the parents rather than the children. In most instances, the teachers described children as having quite plastic models of what it means to be a different person and were able to fairly easily empathise with others and alter their values if they found that they were in conflict, and were encouraged to do so. However, the children’s parents often had solidified beliefs and were now in the role of instilling or enforcing those beliefs onto their children. This meant that they were often actively constraining their children’s ability to fluidly adapt their perceptions of other people’s experience. With this perspective in mind, many participants proposed that the service be adapted to somehow include parents into the experiences, perhaps through school, community events.

02

Space to explore topics and discuss

Teachers also explained that what was lacking in children’s educational experience was the space to discuss, ask questions and explore the relevance of what they were learning. In this sense, the concept of learning about other people’s experience should be considered as an opportunity for them to learn about themselves and what these empathy experiences expose about who they are.

03

Appropriate experiences

Many agreed that virtual reality was a fantastic way to create transformative experiences because of its immersive capability. However, they felt the content of some of the empathy experiences would likely be uncomfortable for many children. Therefore, the design of the experiences and the intensity with which they expose children to someone else’s life would have to be considered, not just on an age rated basis, but potentially on a case by case basis. To ensure those experiences were appropriate, it would be important to take into account what individual children are experiencing, what the community is going through andthe culture within the school. —all of which make the administering of this type of education highly challenging.

04

Authorship of the experiences

The most pressing topic was about the authorship of the experiences with many questions around proving the legitimacy of the stories being told. While it is proposed that experiences would be based on true events, they are still recreated stories that may be interpreted differently by many people. Although it is proposed for the stories to be curated in collaboration with assemblies of the public, experts, charities and individuals who have lived experiences of the issues being portrayed, it is clear that there will always be questions over the accuracy of the stories, particularly while they are being used to open children’s perceptions. There will always be some people that feel the process is brainwashing. When immersive technology gets used to provide transformative experiences for children —at what point does it become brainwashing?

Jump to

Propositions

Mobible

Mobible is a chatbot that helps connect your faith with you, your life and your community based on church teachings and knowledge decoded from the scripture.

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.

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:

How can educational systems harness transformative, empathy-inducing technologies to provoke tolerance and social cohesion in a way that involves the entire community and avoids accusations of brainwashing?

Related to ‘Emotional Money’

Scenarios

Connected localism

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.

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.

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.

Emotional money

Overlapping emotional and financial value

Mobible is a chatbot that helps connect your faith with you, your life and your community based on church teachings and knowledge decoded from the scripture.

What is the problem?

Maintaining religious practice in a busy and increasingly digital life poses challenges for people who may struggle to see the value in attending a more traditional church ceremony or adhering to the church’s existing cultures. However, they still keep their faith and want to live by it. People may also find that translating religious teachings into practical guidance for life can be demanding. The pace of change in society poses regular challenges to the church’s position, forcing them to adjust and adapt their interpretations of scripture to keep  harmony between moral teachings and modern life

How Mobible responds

Mobible decodes scripture and uses that as the foundation for a chatbot that can be tailored by your church’s teachings. Each congregant can have conversational guidance whenever they want, which can guide them through their thoughts on anything that’s on their mind.

Ask the Bible:
People can ask the Holy Bible whatever they need and be supported through their difficult situations. Mobible has decoded the scriptures with expert support from religious leaders so each person can enter into conversation with their religion. They can follow their denomination or their specific group.

Pray together:
Mobible supports people through their prayer sessions either individually or as collectives. It shows people their stats about how much they have prayed and helps them recognise patterns and form new rituals.

Connect your leaders:
Mobible connects people with their leaders so they are easier to book time with to speak to for advice or confession, and it allows them to pass on their teachings through the app if people have missed a service or simply so that faith can be more present in their everyday life rather than just once a week.

Donation management:
Through the app, people can donate to their community, the wider church or any other causes they wish to through the Donation Management system that connects to people’s accounts. People can pay single amounts, pay by round-up on all their  small transactions or by direct debit.

Connect to your community:
Using the community page, people can post a message to everyone from their church who is in the area, whether they need a hand with something or just have something to say about the last service together. This can also expand out to connect with people from other churches or other faiths.

Learn about other religions:
In any interactions with the Mobible chatbot, users can also cross-reference teachings from other denominations and other religions to see how they would respond to the same issues. In doing so, people can see the similarities and differences in an attempt to promote tolerance.

Find out how we did a ‘backcasting of the value propositions’.
Read More

What we
learnt

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

  • We found that people saw many opportunities for their church to capitalise on modern formats of interaction to expand what the church could offer, break down boundaries and create more free, open spaces for conversation. 
  • While there was concern about the authority or authorship of the service, it posed exciting new ways to explore their relationship to faith.

Emerging topics from this proposition are around:

  • the way that congregations are connected or disconnected how the proposition poses challenges to the unusual dynamics of agency within faith experiences.

Jump to:

Service Visions

Pocket Jesus

Pocket Jesus is an application that codifies the Christian faith and quantifies your religious practice.
Find out how we ‘Discussed the implications of the prototypes’.
Read More

01

Faith Platforms

Underlying this concept is a proposal that can bring together, under one platform, different faiths or at least denominations of faith.Theoretically, using Machine Learning and AI the bible and scripture could be decoded and analysed to serve as the foundation for church knowledge and guidance. Because different churches interpret the scripture differently, there would need to be customisations to how the service represents each church’s teachings. t In this way, it divides the teachings into different arrangements of interpretation, but the common platform of the service would allow people to see windows into other interpretations.

This could mean that as you move through your faith experience, gradually learning about your church’s teaching and other church’s teaching ,you may shift and move and find other teaching’s more in line with your own values. In doing so, you may consequently have more freedom to follow those principles instead. In which case, would you leave your physical church and community entirely? Or do those elements serve a different purpose? How might this freedom to move between churches with different interpretations influence people’s relationship with the church and its role in people’s lives or influence the significance of the specific nature of people’s beliefs?

02

Church community

Many of those we spoke with talked about the importance of the church ‘family’, which brings them immense security, a place where everyone knows you well and can support you. But even those who talk fondly about this community, convey issues with expressing their views or talking about taboo topics because there is also a status associated with the purity of someone’s ethics and sophistication of their religious knowledge. They felt that this climate prevents dialogue and that potentially having other domains for conversation could help make the community more honest and connected. They also described how the other ‘community tools’ in the proposition could help bring people together to support each other whether they are of the same faith or not. But the fact they have faith in some way may bring them a sense of security and commonality, which could promote religious tolerance.

03

Power

This service brings religious authority into people’s lives in a more integrated way and would claim to give more specific guidance to people’s circumstances. Some of our participants felt very strongly that this could lead to too much power in the hands of too few people, particularly with a potential escalation in the amount of data collected about people and the increased capacity for manipulating people based on that data. However, they also felt that the ability to see other examples of religious leadership may mean that people feel less obligated to their leaders. Overall, they felt that even though people may have more freedom, discussing ethics with an algorithmic interpretation of your faith with specific connection to your issues could give religious teachings more authority than they should have.

04

Exchanging agency

Some participants argued that part of what is important about being religious is relinquishing some of their agency and control in their life in submission to god. They described this as an exchange whereby reducing their agency relieves their dependency on externalities in their life that they can’t control. That choice to be less in control puts control in God, but ostensibly in the hands of the church and could therefore potentially be corrupted like many other organisations. If Mobible had enough authority, it could encourage the surrendering of even more agency. Would this make people happier? Could the closer integration of faith in people’s lives help them adopt teachings into everyday life and therefore become more independent of the church?

Another perspective in this discussion is that some people described faith as being about a relationship with God, which requires an ongoing self-discovery and a constant search for understanding about themselves and their place in God’s world. This portrays the ‘exchange of agency’ in a much more balanced light that empowers the follower. Within this alternative perspective, would Mobible help people understand themselves? Or does it corrupt the nature of people’s relationship with God and treat decisions as transactions of knowledge rather than self-reflection.

Jump to

Propositions

Empath

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

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.

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:

How can faith platforms be created in a manner that would promote religious tolerance, support communities and create empowering dynamics without fostering disproportionate power imbalances or distorting people’s relationship with God?

Related to ‘Emotional Money’

Scenarios

Connected localism

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.

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.

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.

Emotional money

Overlapping emotional and financial value

Ethos learns, tracks and guides people’s behaviours to help them live more in line with their values and beliefs.

What is the problem

Many people feel strongly about their values and want to be able to live in a way that supports those values and doesn’t unknowingly contradict them. Unfortunately, buying almost anything and engaging in many services can embroil people in vast globalised supply chains and complex ethical dilemmas about anything from labour rights to climate change. This makes it increasingly hard to live in alignment with what people believe, or for the ‘free market’ to be influenced by what people actually want.

How Ethos responds

Ethos decodes and quantifies the ethical implications involved in the purchase of products and services through advanced global blockchain supply chain tracking. It then compares the values of the product to your priorities to see which options suit you best. You have access to all the information, so you can see how each suggestion is made and adjust your preferences until Ethos is fully aligned with what you believe. Once you are in alignment, Ethos can begin to make assumptions about what is right for you. Alternatively, you can select ethical guides, who are people or organisations whose values you trust, and  can highlight ethical conflicts and direct your Ethos

Codify your values:
Through conversation and the tracking of people’s purchases and activities, Ethos can codify people’s values.

See the ethics behind products and services:
Just by scanning a product, Ethos can recognise whether a product clashes with someone’s values or whether it supports them.

Recommendations help you align with your ethos:
Ethos goes beyond just information, it can make the best recommendation for someone by balancing all of their prioritised values. For instance, it can propose someone to purchase non-organic tomatoes from a local shop rather than organic ones from a superstore because the environmental impact of the air-miles may be more of an issue for that person than the use of some pesticides.
Ethos also gives people the option to choose ethical ‘guides’ who are people and organisations whose ethics the user trusts. The ethical guides can make recommendations and highlight new issues to their followers and subsequently enable new types of activism through collective micro-actions —like joining a boycott.

See how well you are aligned with your values:
Ethos tracks people’s behaviour over time and allows them to see clearly how their values align with their everyday actions. This can either support them to align more or help them recognise values that aren’t as important to them as they previously thought.

Update your Ethos and check the facts behind the things you read:
Ethos stays updated with the latest science.When people read something new that makes them question the ethics of a product, they can also let Ethos know it’s important to them and fact-check it against their records. This allows Ethos to prevent fake news and stay up-to-date with what’s important to users and what’s happening in the world.

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

What we
learnt

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

  •  Many of the users we spoke to responded to this proposition with excitement at the potential to alleviate the burden of decision-making while also maintaining their responsibilities as ethical consumers.

Emerging areas of interest are about:

  • the legitimacy of the service provider’s authority and how necessary it is; and, 
  • the discussion about the capacity and responsibility people have to engage with the politics of their actions.
Find out how we ‘Discussed the implications of the prototypes’.

01

Authority

One of the main discussions around the service was about who had the authority to initiate it and make judgements about the veracity of ethical claims about products and services. Who has enough neutral respect and authority in the public eye that could administer these judgements without fear of corruption or bias? This question ultimately unveils the need for someone to design algorithmic assessments, which would ‘solve’ ethical dilemmas at a global scale —people felt uneasy about where that responsibility is placed.

This question of authority goes even further when we consider the implications of the ‘ethical guides’ in Ethos. The idea that popular organisations, companies and individuals can intervene and nudge people’s actions at such a granular level, allows for huge new power amongst collectives wanting to act on the world. Large companies may be forced to comply with any widely held values of their customers. Who is to question the legitimacy of ethical standpoints?

This may seem like a simple extension of the role of an instagrammer or sponsored celebrity, but it could ultimately instill ethical decisions way beyond daily life and possibly create divisions between people in a potentially harmful way.

02

Enriching and expanding the politics of life

People found the concept of learning about the implications of everything appealing because it meant that the politics of everyday life could become more real and actionable. If buying a particular snack for lunch aligned you with a set of values, in the same way as buying a particular newspaper voting for a different leader, then you could feel more proactive and engaged as a citizen.

03

Financial capacity to be ethical

One criticism of the service is that it places all the responsibility of an ethical society in the hands of the consumer. Some participants felt the service could only be used by wealthy people because ‘it costs money to be ethical’ and would make people with less money feel bad.

There is an argument to be made that a service like this would still help people use ethics to discern between products, even if they have low economic power, and if it were the case that the range of products available to less wealthy people were all similarly unethical (or misaligned to some people’s values), then there is still more opportunity for people to act collectively based on the increased knowledge of a products ethics, than if there were no transparency.

That said, the service does seem to make a judgement in its assessment of the alignment between your values and how you act —it essentially questions how ‘true’ you are to your beliefs. This judgement is offensive and must either become neutral or be weighted by people’s capacity to purchase ethically, so that it would not be seen as a callous willingness to compromise to save money.

04

Responsibility vs Ease

Users also felt that there was an interesting conflict within the service. The idea that the service understands you, learns what is important to you and recommends you alternatives based on that logic or based on an ‘ethical guide’ means that you can detach yourself from the complexity and burden of each decision. On the other hand, the fact that there is so much information available about the implications of each action means that you could dig deeper into any decision.

Users felt that by handing over decision making responsibilities you could live aligned to your values without the impossibly huge level of assessments that it would take to decide these things manually. However, people should regularly engage with these decisions because the world would change, new information emerges and people’s beliefs change. So, for someone to be decoded and then follow that prescribed course indefinitely would be an abdication of responsibility.

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.

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.

Our new direction of exploration

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


What scope is there for tech-enabled ethical decision making and how can it be harnessed to safely empower consumers to shape the world?

Related to ‘Emotional Money’

Scenarios

Connected localism

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.

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.

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.

Emotional money

Overlapping emotional and financial value

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.

What is the problem

In a context where lifestyle choices frequently drive chronic diseases and where life expectancy is increasingly expanding, the quality of life people have in their old age is in far sharper focus. People try to optimise their lives to prevent ill health and unhappiness during old age. Still, the issue for many is that it can be challenging to make decisions about what to do and what to eat etc. because it’s not clear what impact things have. And when there is a conflict between activities that make you happy and those that make you healthy, balancing your decisions can lead to guilt or anxiety.

How Qualitime responds

Qualitime gives people a way to quantify and compare the impacts of all their decisions in simple health and happiness metrics. This  allows them to recognise patterns in their behaviour with adequate information, with which  they can make informed decisions about their lives. The consequence of having behaviours driven by their impact on life expectancy and health to happiness, gives each individual highly meaningful data about the value of their time, and helps them tune their life to what’s important to them.

See the impact of every action:
Through wearable devices and artificial intelligence, people can know how happy activities make them and estimate their impacts on their lifespan. What might it mean if an hour of happiness equates to  a day less of your life? Is it worth it?

Rank your activities:
All activities can be compared and ranked against each other based on how happy they make people and how much they extend their life. The ranking of these activities helps them prioritise the things in life that mean the most to them.

Find patterns in your behaviours:
Through intelligent analysis, Qualitime finds and highlights patterns in people’s behaviour that have impacts on their happiness and life span, so that they are armed with accurate information to help them prioritise how to spend their time.

Track and recommend:
People can see how their priorities have changed over time and get recommendations on  alternative happiness sources.

Find out how we did a ‘backcasting of the value propositions’.
Read More

What we
learnt

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

  • Many of the users we spoke to responded to this proposition with excitement. They expressed that there is a frequent conflict in their minds about the best way to live in a way that meets their desires, but avoids their fears. 
  • They discussed their fear  of dying alone and unhappy or as a burden on members of their family. A significant part of what they described as their purpose and as their source of happiness was about relishing the opportunity to be with family and support them wherever possible.

Emerging areas of interest around this proposition are about:

  • the way it may influence the behavioural styles of life; 
  • how it may contribute a fascinating level of insight to all aspects of life; and,
  • how  the service cannot isolate the impact of its own presence on the experience of life, maybe even damaging some of life’s ‘magic’.

Jump to:

Service Visions

Dignitime

Dignitime quantifies all your actions in relation to their life expectancy cost and how happy they make you.
Find out how we ‘Discussed the implications of the prototypes’.
Read More

01

Different life management styles

People describe contending with a constant set of negotiations regarding health and happiness. They stated that they would often simplify their decisions by installing blanket bans on activities or by creating strict routines that are considered and then adhered to. They discuss how having access to this type of data could help them recognise broader patterns of behaviour, meaning that they wouldn’t need to use such strict methods to construct and manage day-to-day life. Consequently, we may find that the service (and others like it) have side effects like enabling people to have more relaxed or spontaneous lives. An analogy could be that having live updating maps on our phones doesn’t just mean that city dwellers may spend less time planning or getting lost, it also frees people from their routes and maps giving them the scope to explore, use and socialise in cities in new ways.

02

Influence of the service itself: complex interdependencies between health and happiness

One clear topic is about how the service itself could influence the value of certain activities simply by sharing information about it. If having a glass of wine previously harmed your life expectancy but made you happy, perhaps learning about its influence on your life expectancy may damage the happiness you take from it. Other ways that the service may struggle to isolate its own impact is in its social aspects. For instance, could it become commonplace to share happiness scores? If so, what if different people influence each other’s happiness in different ways? Or, what if your happiness is typically lower than the rest of your community? For some, this level of integration between AI and life is intrusive and potentially damaging.

03

Damaging abstract qualities of human experience

The final discussion we touch on here is about a more abstract concern about the role of technology in our lives. People voiced hesitancy about quantifying such important things like life expectancy or the value you place on day-to-day life because of the damage it may cause to the vivacity and experience of life. Participants felt that by eliminating inaccurate understandings of ourselves and exposing all our decisions to such high levels of clear and transparent rationality, we expose our own irrationalities and we either correct them or we continue to live by them. But either way, we somehow reduce the authenticity of the human experience.

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Propositions

Pulse

Pulse extends your gaming life outside of the digital space in order to incentivise healthy activities and prevent gaming from becoming detrimental.

Propositions

Edit

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

Our new direction of exploration

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

How might we offer people powerful insights about themselves to support happier lifestyles without damaging valued, but less ‘rational’ components of life and without disrupting more abstract characteristics of the human experience?

Related to ‘Emotional Money’

Scenarios

Connected localism

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.

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.

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.

Emotional money

Overlapping emotional and financial value

Pulse extends your gaming life outside of the digital space to incentivise healthy activities and prevent gaming from becoming detrimental.

What is the problem?

We know games are on the rise—by 2021, it is estimated there will be 2.6 billion online gamers. And with advances in game technology, games are becoming more life-like, more creative, and more immersive. This future presents exciting opportunities: studies show the potential benefits of gaming (e.g. increased hand-eye coordination, confidence building, problem-solving). However, medical experts voice concerns about the risk of addiction, loneliness, and detachment from reality.

In particular, experts from the newly-established NHS Centre for Internet Addiction report that adolescents aged 12-20 are at the highest risk of heavy game-playing.

In response to these rapid changes, governments have responded with new regulations. In 2018, China suspended new game licenses, and since 2011, South Korea has regulated both age and hour of play.

How Pulse responds

Pulse  intervenes in this emerging environment to create a service that empowers users to integrate games healthily in their routine, and champions a more nuanced response to games than outright bans on play. Pulse collaborates with your favourite games and sports brands to help you earn in-game rewards for hitting real-world heartbeat targets and going to meetups with other gamers. In doing so, it supports mental and physical wellbeing while also promoting the best sides of gaming.

Beat – Game points for Heart beats:
Connect people’s smartwatches to their favourite games to earn in-game rewards for every minute they get their heart rate going 40 beats above their resting heart rate, wherever they are, whatever they’re doing. Run up and down the stairs. Jog down to the shop, do 100 star jumps – it all adds up. ‘Beat’ helps people keep active on a regular basis.

Bunch – Game points for social meet-ups
Earn in-game rewards for everyone that’s present at each ‘pulse bunch meetup’. People go to gamer meetups  and check in with the Pulse ‘Bunch’ mode. It can be a big organised event or just a few friends, but the more people there are present, the more reward everyone walks away with. The goal is to encourage gamers to take breaks and socialise in different contexts to improve mental health and prevent addiction.

Boost – Hit customised exercise goals:
After a while of using Pulse, it sets a range of ‘Boost’ challenges based on your activity level, like hitting 100,000 steps in a week or running 10km. When people achieve their weekly challenge, they can get bumper pay-outs. Helping to gamify real-world experiences in order to escalate people’s physical fitness.

Break – Stick to pauses to gain in-game rewards:
Break encourages users to make a plan for how long they want their gaming sessions to last and then set when and how long the breaks will be. If they then stick to their plan, they earn even more. Regular breaks are good for people and help them focus, but now breaks also earn in-game rewards.

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

What we
learnt

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

  • Our users’ response to this was highly engaged regarding Pulse’s support of behaviours they know are appropriate, but feel they need additional incentive to enact. 
  • People found that the perpetual extension of gaming activity in their lives was fairly slow and deceivingly difficult to quantify, and therefore, the impacts were unseen but deleterious. For this reason, having a background nudge to protect their time and health was highly welcomed.

Emerging areas of interest around this proposition are about who the owner or authority of the service should be, how it should connect to our social lives and where this idea of extending games into reality might go.

Find out how studio teams ‘built their prototypes’.

01

Who is responsible

While the service was broadly well received, there were questions raised among potential users about some of the inherent risks of the service. If the service creates custom fitness goals for individuals, would it be able to understand people’s disabilities and be able to remain inclusive? For people with especially addictive personalities, while physical fitness addiction may be healthier than gaming addiction, is it fair to direct people towards it, and may it cause physical harm if taken too far?

02

Connection to real life

A key discussion arising from the research was around the social element of the service. On one hand, people felt the service should be more social in ways that would promote competition between peoples fitness levels, but on the other hand people found that incentives for meetups could be an overstep. People value points as a way to promote events, however, as soon as people considered there was a health agenda behind it, which uses face-to-face socialising to help lift people’s wellbeing and activity outside online gaming worlds —they felt it was intrusive and patronising. This sheds light on the sensitivity of service interventions in interpersonal relationships, in particular with paternalistic approaches to social wellbeing.

03

Gaming real life

Another interesting area of discussion is about what may be a precursor to this service. People considered that this type of service marks a clear crossing of boundaries between online gaming and offline gaming. Importantly, it’s not simply playing games in an offline environment, like playing football. It means adding a gaming layer to otherwise un-gamed parts of life to have a desired impact. To people, this seemed like a space that could be extremely exciting as it could inject fun into old experiences and build new layers of complexity to mundane parts of life. People seemed to connect deeply to the value of play in their life and perceived its re-emergence as exciting. The flip side, however, is that our compulsion as humans to engage in games and play could be taken advantage of to further agendas that may be less admirable or that the over use of such tangible incentives (like gaming currency) to influence may undermine more intrinsic motivations.

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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.

Propositions

Mobible

Mobible is a chatbot that helps connect your faith with you, your life and your community based on church teachings and knowledge decoded from the scripture.

Find out how studio teams did a ‘synthesis of the insights and discussed their learnings’.

Our new direction of exploration

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

In the expanding world of gaming and its potential use as a health incentive, where does the line get drawn and who gets to draw it?

Related to ‘Emotional Money’

Scenarios

Connected localism

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.

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.

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.