Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

Background

This app was developed based on original features from the original Edit service proposition. While the original Edit proposition explores a holistic approach to building healthier habits over time, the Edit app is a live test of smaller features conceptualised earlier.

In the original Edit proposition, there was an underlying idea of helping people build new and purposeful rituals while tracking the effect of those new rituals to help shift their behavior. These were what we referred to as ‘edits’. This live app is a simple test of the impact of ritual design on behavior change. While we proved the impact of ritual design through high-touch prototypes, it was essential to test this mechanism’s validity for change when left up to people’s daily whims.

The Edit app, in its current form, simply curates a list of ‘edits’ for people to try when craving a cigarette. Each individual can try different edits and indicate when they do it and how well it works. As users find edits that work for them, they can add them to their daily routine and effectively create rituals that help cope with different cravings that arise throughout the day.

Experiments

Our initial experiments and prototypes focused on explicitly testing the concept of ritual design and its impact on changing behavior. We engaged two users over two weeks using a combination of other tools (such as WhatsApp) to create the effect of a service that allows you to form new rituals to reduce cigarette intake. By mimicking a chatbot that helped users form new daily rituals and track the impact, we were able to reduce the amount each user smoked by 63-84%.

While the above experiments proved successful, we were very aware of the impact of another person acting as the chatbot. Ultimately, there is a variable around accountability that wouldn’t play as much of a factor in a purely digital-driven solution. With that in mind, we created the Edit App to test the impact of ritual design on new habit formation in a less controlled environment.

The Edit App allows users to freely plan and design daily rituals, similar to the ones we suggested in our manual experiments. While a chatbot wasn’t developed due to cost and time, we did pull through all the possible “edits” that we curated in the manual experiments.

Find out how we ‘Updated the strategic questions’ to define the design research strategy.
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What is Edit?

With the ability to track the cigarettes you smoke and over 75 curated replacement activities, you’ll have the tools you need to build new routines that don’t involve smoking. Edit takes proven approaches for developing healthier habits and makes them simple to do with an app that smoothly fits into your daily life.

01

Track your progress

Edit makes tracking cigarettes easy so you can see your progress over time and start to make positive changes in your habits. Tracking every time you have a cigarette or vape is a proven method for reducing how much you smoke.

02

Try new things

What can you do instead of smoking? Edit suggests positive actions for you to try instead of smoking cigarettes. With over 100 suggestions in “Your Stack” you’ll have plenty of new things to try.

03

Build a New Routine

Once you start to figure out what works for you, you can set reminders that will help you slowly build a routine that has less cigarettes in it. Reducing how much you smoke requires you to make small changes to your daily routine so you can edit out cigarettes.

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.
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Service visions

Eidos

Eidos is a personal AI assistant that works with you to understand who you are and to create desired behaviour change over time.
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What we’ve learnt

01

Engagement is a barrier

While the mechanism of designing new rituals for one’s self is valuable for changing behavior, how you engage an individual with that process is critical to the success of the service. When left with a curated list of possible new rituals to form and some basic tracking features, users didn’t remain engaged over a long enough period to see a change in behavior.

02

Incentive drives engagement

While this is not novel learning for anyone in the digital services world, it is worth restating. When we analysed the Edit App’s different features that were restricting engagement, we realised that there were not enough variable rewards for using the app. It relied far too heavily on a user’s self-motivation to reduce their daily cigarette intake. This is a clear design challenge for the future of the app.

03

Usage context is critical

One of the main differences between our manual experiments (which were very successful) and the Edit App is the ability to provide context to the user. When manually interacting with users through a fake chatbot, we were able to explain why a particular new ritual would impact their smoking habit. There was no such context with the Edit App, perhaps leaving users feeling lost.

04

Track the Right Thing

The Edit App promotes the tracking of smoked cigarettes so users can see their progress over time, which is a worthy feature in theory. In reality, we found users would much prefer to track their cravings through the app and immediately have curated replacement activities to help fight those cravings.

Jump to:

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Scenarios

Personal control

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

Emerging discussions

How much control? And control over what?


Perhaps the most interesting discussion to come out of all of the Edit work is the idea of agency, and over what people actually want agency.We set out on this journey with the underlying goal of giving people agency over their behaviour and, in turn, agency over their wellbeing. 

What we believe today is different than when we started. It’s worth exploring whether people actually want total control over their health or if they just want to benefit from what comes with being healthier. Does a smoker honestly want complete agency over their quitting journey, or do they want a third party (such as Edit) to force them to quit, so they can get on with their life free from the controlling addiction? This brings up the question of the role of technology in helping people to increase their overall wellbeing, which unfortunately is a highly complex system.

For example, does a smoker want technology to take over the responsibility of quitting so that they can have complete agency over their fitness routine, something that was once controlled and constrained by their smoking addiction? 

We believe it’s far too assumptive and generic to design things to give complete agency. The reality is that total agency over everything that has to do with your wellbeing can increase stress rather than reduce it. Finding the balance between user control and technology control continues to be the struggle we face as services get smarter, and humans get more demanding.

Team
David Freemeyer
Rhea Belani

Other services developed

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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.

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.

Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

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.

jump to:

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’.
Read More

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’.
Read More

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?

Other services developed

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.

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.

Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

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’.
Read More

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’.
Read More

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?

Jump to:

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.

Jump to:

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?

Other services developed

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.

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.

Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

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’.
Read More

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?

Other services developed

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.

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.

Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

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.

jump to:

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?

Other services developed

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.

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.

Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

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

How the scenario could unfold

In this hypothetical environment, we speculate about a world of increasing opportunities to self-optimise.

Medical technologies continue to emerge that delve deeper into genetic manipulation and other biological means of improving the human condition both physically and mentally removing defects and enhancing capacity. The development of technologies such as cloud computing, IoT and AI could enable service systems that live on, around or in the human body with more and more prevalence. These new types of technology may integrate with people in ways that blur the boundaries further between human capacity and technological capacity.

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.

Don’t be a snowflake. Nobody owes you anything – It’s down to you.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Work instability

Automation and climate change will cause huge turmoil in economies, people may be working online, based on their chosen field or “gig”, and move in search of better economic environments. Reputation will become ever more vital as people have to quickly and consistently re-establish themselves and we will see more online platforms supporting offline gig workers’ skills.

Dimensions of change

Relationships

Technology expands the scope and meaning of what relationships are while disrupting some existing dynamics. Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.

Thomas is a contract developer working for one of the fastest growing startups in Europe. He is highly paid for his age, so he earns the right to party whenever he wants. His old friends joke that he’s now part of the privileged elite, which makes him angry because he feels he has made it on his own merit. He feels conservatives are underrepresented in tech, so he often ends up confronting people who he feels are liberal just because it’s ‘cooler’.

Happiness for Thomas is living in the moment, pushing his life to the maximum. He believes results speak for themselves and success is earned on a daily basis, so he does everything he can to always perform at his peak. He doesn’t feel like he’s making progress unless he’s causing friction, but recognises that sometimes he goes overboard and has recently signed up for a mindfulness app. 

His goals

Thomas’ goals are to keep ahead of the ‘competition’ at all times by constantly building on his own success. He wants to optimise his schedule and all of his ways of working, but wants to find more balance, perhaps by reconnecting with his friends. 

Thomas thinks that work is a stage on which you prove your worth and a means to maximise the quality of your life. You should give it everything you can.

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

Explorations in ‘Self expansion’

We explore the future  by looking for potential points of friction between this scenario of Self Expansion and the needs of someone like Thomas. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

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

Digital drugstore

Digital drug store is a store specialised in augmentation technologies that can be installed on or into humans. The range of options is ever expanding. There are tools to enhance muscle growth, support memory, perfect your nutritional balance, improve concentration and reduce your need for sleep.

Some augmentations are permanent, some are one-off and fade over time, others come with free installation, but you pay for performance boosts as and when you need them.

If you prefer a more natural approach and wish to avoid capacity enhancers, Digital Drug store also offer innovative sensing technologies that provide advanced analysis of your physical and mental performance, which, in conjunction with our expert consultation service, helps you tune yourself through lifestyle changes.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Live Services

Edit

Edit is an app that helps you fill your daily routine with more positive actions than smoking. It’s not about quitting cold turkey or feeling like a patient. It’s just about trying new things and seeing if they work for you and your lifestyle.

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

From this exploration, we can speculate that services may emerge, which expand human potential either by enhancing our capacities, supplementing our bodies, adding new functional attributes or simply by finely tuning ourselves through our lifestyles.

These services may raise numerous questions for individuals and society, but for people like Thomas, whose work means so much to them, this may seem like a new world of huge potential.

If it is possible for people to dramatically expand their capacity in the working environment, in competitive cultures this could lead to an ‘arms race’ type mentality or performance inflation. Should everyone in the office improve their numerical computing capacity and upgrade their attention span and memory skills, what might people need to do to get a promotion?  We may also see a heightened exploration of what makes specific individuals good at certain tasks, because potentially these innate or pre-existing strengths may have advantages over purely enhanced capabilities. Or perhaps, certain attributes won’t be so readily augmented and therefore more in demand.

In this scenario, It’s plausible  that we may also see services emerge that help people find balance through reducing such a competitive mentality in individuals or workplace environments, opting instead for opportunities to build capacities that lead to exceptional collaboration. We may see questions being raised about why we work, about quality of life and potential enquiries into how we could make these technologies that help everybody reduce the need for work.

An additional area of discussion could form around the challenge this may pose to notions of equality. If such technologies became available, who would they be available to? If access was controlled by wealth and power, and access leads to more capacity, then these technologies have the capacity to also drive inequality into even more dangerous territories.

Other services developed

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.

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.

Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

Identity could grow more fluid as people gain more freedom to pursue the lifestyles of their choosing outside normative assumptions of race, nationality, sexuality, gender, age and more. More nuanced characteristics are supported by social media niches alongside AI that may raise self awareness to help you define what works for you.

How the scenario may emerge

There are many reasons why people’s identity could become more fluid. We have been witness to long term cultural battlegrounds around race, gender and sexuality.  Although there is a long way to go and the direction is not always correct, it could be argued that progress in some parts of western society has led to increased freedoms in expression and exploration of identity.

If we couple this with emerging trends in migration (which may rapidly expand in a climate crisis), remote working, and gig economies ,we can also see flexibility emerging in how people use their careers, location and nationalities to define who they are.

This ability to choose not only means that people can fulfil a previously suppressed side of themselves, but it means they can experiment to understand a broader foundation of what it means to be them. This pursuit of self-understanding may well be influenced or supported by the emergence of emotional AI that could enhance our self-understanding by bringing us sophisticated insights about our character and patterns in collective identities.

While this fluidity is defined by a relaxation of what it means to be a part of strongly defined demographics, those demographics still demarcate differences in power that mean this freedom will inevitably be less available to some.

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

Find out how we ‘Learned from extreme users’.
Read More

What might that mean for Sam?

For someone like Sam, whose identity is constantly being explored, the value of knowing yourself is built through changing yourself. We can explore how services may challenge or meet the needs of ‘fluid people’.

I have to keep friends up to date with who I am so they’re not shocked with my changes… Nothing stays the same.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Altered Parenthood

Advances in medicine could result in increased life expectancy and the extension of sociological or biological phases of life, such as reproductivity. New ways of creating children and alternative types of familial structure may remodel important concepts of identity relating to families, in particular, what it means to be a ‘parent’.

Dimensions of change

Spirituality

Values and beliefs could be strained by a mixture of people’s environment and self-discovery.

Sam has been largely independent since they were 16 years old. They have now found a supportive and caring community among fellow LGBT+ people but they have to schedule and rotate time with friends from different parts of their life. They work as a mechanic with their uncle, they have football friends, work friends from the nightclub, uni friends where they study Physics, and church friends. In each environment, they like to represent slightly differently.

People like Sam are happy when they are free to embody different sides of themselves and whatever they’d like to be. Happiness comes from simple things like a well timed cup of tea  — it is a spectrum of different momentary states. While a lot of their happiness comes from being able to have the experiences they want, they still take value from purpose, like the role they take from being a part of a community at church or working with their uncle.

Their goal

Their goal is to understand themselves and be understood by others. They want to create control, purpose, and independence in their life and want to build new connections and relationships based on truly authentic self-expression.

Sam’s happiness is heavily impacted by the freedom they have to create authentic interactions between their true identity and the world around them.

Explorations in ‘Identity fluidity’

We explore the future by looking for potential points of traction between this scenario of identity fluidity and the needs of someone like Sam. 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 ‘Conducted lab explorations’.
Read More
01

Sides of me

A platform that uses AI to monitor your emotions and behaviours, so you understand all the different sides of your character. It shows you how your character is related to people in different contexts and how you’re perceived by others.

Team: The Lab

jump to:

propositions

Mymes

Mymes uses an understanding of people’s behaviour to create simulations of their future to help them make decisions and it distills different sides of their character to help them explore who they are.
02

Non-Dinary

Non-Dinary is an educational dining experience focused on the notion of gender as a construct. Non-Dinary approaches this conversation in an unconventional and lighthearted way to create a transformational journey for uninformed cisgender people to develop a greater understanding of gender non-conformity.The service also captures the level of comprehension about the wider spectrum of gender, the changes in gender acceptance geographically and over time and to better understand learning patterns to raise institutional awareness.

Team:
Francesco Cagnola
Kiran Dulay
Kun Qian
Luwen Zhang
Saumya Singhal
Yue Yu

Jump to:

Service vision

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

Osmosis

Osmosis is an AI expression and reflection service that helps young people focus their attention on what deeply matters to them, using their aspirations as a lens to understand what beliefs and values are essential to developing their agency.

Team:
Declan Kickham
Timothy Worms

Jump to:

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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.

Emerging topics

In this set of explorations, we were asked to consider scenarios where huge advances in AI mean that people may be understood by digital services better than they can themselves. Consistent data inputs about our emotional state and our actions can be cross referenced to give people new levels of insight that simply would not be achievable without regular monitoring and algorithmic analysis.

Within these visions, we can anticipate issues with how technology can define a person’s identity in a neutral, meaningful and nuanced way.  For example, if there were issues in our algorithms, the mirror they hold up to people may be inaccurate but unquestioned, which could potentially result in a multitude of side effects. As another example – if someone experiences something challenging in their life, an algorithm may confuse that as an entirely negative situation, and discourage them from continuing with it. In such a circumstance, people might rarely leave their comfort zones and the technology could corrupt someone’s understanding of themselves and alter their chosen course in life.

Beyond the conversation about AI led human understanding, we may also see the proliferation of services which respond to the adaptations of people’s identity. This may simply be provision of service in neutral ways or highly nuanced ways or they may blend a standard offering with a political and social message. They may go beyond services that consider and accommodate more fluid states of identity toward actively encouraging new levels of comprehension around a particular topic.

When viewed collectively, these explorations remind us that while technology may enhance some new found identity freedoms within ourselves, they will always exist in a complex world where other individuals and organisations have their own political agendas that may become increasingly vocal and perhaps not so fluid.

Other services developed

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.

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.

The commoditisation of our needs and values to incentivise behaviour change

Need Commoditisers

New wealth, new trade offs, same data battle

The advanced digitisation of our lives could result in the quantifying and subsequent unionisation of different aspects of behaviour and the values that drive them. This could lead to the trading, gaming, competing and collecting of those units as if they were commodities, and the use of these commodities by ourselves and others to influence our behaviour further.

For example, someone’s commitment to environmental causes could be measured and coded and turned into earnable credits or tokens. Then, the environmentally positive behaviour is transformed into a currency because that behaviour has an understood value in multiple contexts, to multiple people.

What might be down the path?

Within this new service role, we can envisage an extension of the concept of ‘the quantified self’. In other words, data simply provides insight, to the user and potentially others, into a dynamic where the data is commoditised as a proxy for the behaviour that led to it. As a consequence, we may see trends around new types of ‘wealth’ resulting from new ways of comparing value between people and companies. We may see tangible connections drawn between different areas of our lives like happiness and health leading to previously unseen, data driven trade-offs. And we may see a power struggle as users try to harness the value of their own actions and data for themselves and for others while continuing to grapple with concepts of privacy and protection.

Each design proposition is a vehicle that helps map this territory.

Find out how we ‘Framed strategic questions’ to define the design research.
Read More
01

Greencoin

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

02

Pulse

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

03

Qualitime

Qualitime is a proposition that 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.

04

Ethos

Ethos is a proposition that learns, tracks and guides your behaviours to help you live more in line with your values and beliefs.

Jump to:

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Proposition Types

Self-Editors

Optimising and Editing yourself and your life to meet your personal criteria for success.

Other Proposition types

Proposition Types

Ethics Providers

Platforms as facilitators and brokers of value judgements. It’s possible that in the future we could foresee an advancement of AI with the ability to codify and model the highly complex ethical parameters of everyday life.

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.

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.

Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

Early testing and development

We developed a prototype that would be the simplest version of our service- This prototype could meaningfully mimic the final offering, so we could experiment, understand the user experience and hone the final proposition before investing too heavily in a native app for the public.

Therefore,we created a web app which encouraged users to ask themselves a question and then subsequently answer this question. The intent was that users would inadvertently find themselves having a fluid conversation with themselves where they may recognise more of their own capacity to respond to their challenges with a clearer thought process.

We recruited 30 users aged 20-50 years old who had a mixed level of self-declared anxiety to use the service as much as they wished over a two week period. Through interviews with the participants, their usage data,  survey responses and the contents of their conversations, we were able to gain many new insights about the experience of our proposition.

The most crucial learning was that most people were sceptical about the idea of having conversations with themselves. People often felt it was embarrassing, ineffective or weren’t quite sure what to do. However, we also found that some people (including some sceptics) were surprised that the process eventually provided strong results for them by helping them think more clearly, feel listened to or even feel less alone. With these main insights, we focussed on guiding and simplifying the conversation process and tried to manage user expectations from the start.

In addition, we found that people wanted more than to just have and store conversations, they wanted to be given a new understanding of themselves based on what they had written. While there are many advanced mechanisms for delivering more understanding, the team sought out new, simple methods to curate their conversations in ways that would show them new insight. One approach to this was to give more emphasis to an already appreciated mood rating feature within the prototype.

Find out how we ‘Updated the strategic questions’ to define the design research strategy.

What is the problem?

This service evolved from research on the EQLs design proposition where we explored how to reduce anxiety in people who struggle to self-reflect. EQLs offered people a range of AI characters to talk to that would support them, monitor their mood and alert them to patterns in their behaviour that influence their happiness. The topics arising from this proposition, which warranted further investigation, were about how people feel about having their emotional status analysed? How comfortable are people sharing intimate information with a digital service? And what types of values people can take from non-human interactions?

We continued our research and found that many young people suffering from anxiety were not engaging with self-reflection because it was often ineffective. And while conversational types of reflection with other people were valued, they were seen as unsafe from a social or emotional perspective, and therefore often avoided. This perception of a lack of safety was often connected to the idea that self-reflection meant you had a mental health problem and therefore shared some of the same stigma.

We chose an approach of developing heuristics that uses conversation to help people build rituals and skills for effective self-reflection in order to ultimately build emotional resilience and agency over their lives. We explored simple technological ways to foster the valuable attributes of conversation with ‘another’, because it is effective and familiar, but does not involve a second human— as it is seen as ‘unsafe’

Download

Not much in order to boost my mood or help me if I’m not feeling great.
It surprised me that playing both roles in a conversation – physically typing the issue and then generating the response yourself is so effective. I might have been very sceptical to be honest but actually doing it showed me how helpful this is to my peace of mind.

What is Hold’?

Following the detailed analysis of the prototype trial, as well as online engagement testing and user interface experiments, we refined the proposal and developed a native web app, available on the Appstore and Playstore.

The proposal was positioned as a tool that helped people think clearly through difficult moments by enabling structured self-conversation. Essentially borrowing the format of conversation with another person, but making it safe, anonymous, private, always available, and easier to reflect on and learn from.

01

Structure self conversation

The main function of the app is a self-conversation feature. The user can start a conversation either by asking themselves a question or simply by saying whatever is on their mind. Immediately after doing this, they are asked to continue depending on how they started, i.e. if they started by saying what is on their mind, then they are prompted to ask themselves a question about what they’ve just said, and then subsequently to answer the question and so on. As they express what they are thinking, their words are displayed in a familiar messenger style conversation format that helps suspend the belief that they are discussing something with someone else.

The conversation can be typed or spoken and the words the user says will be translated into text. At any point, the user can hear an artificial voice (with an accent and gender of their choice) read out their words.

At the end of each conversation, the user is asked to rate their mood and define a title to apply to the conversation.

02

Conversation reflection

All conversations are stored with their titles in a log where they are organised based on the chronology or the mood rating they logged at the time. When a user re-reads a conversation, they can find questions from the app that encourage a healthy and inquisitive reflection of what was written. Additionally, conversations are grouped together automatically based on simple traits such as the most viewed, or highest mood rated. Beyond the automatic collections, users are also prompted to group conversations in more sophisticated classifications such as the topic, or the environment they were written in or the type of emotion they felt.

These different levels of reflective activity encourage users to use the app not just to vent and cathartically divulge their thoughts, but to investigate, consider and understand themselves further.

03

Guided thinking

Throughout the app there is a guiding voice which instructs the user if they are unsure about anything. It bolsters a perception of authority, builds the user’s trust and encourages them to engage with the app. It is this guiding voice that offers a steady selection of optional prompt questions during the conversation as well as reflection questions if they return to their conversations or create collections from them. The positionality of the voice is written to be neutral, trustworthy, informed, non-judgemental and open to support the user in whatever they choose.

04

Respectful in its position

This positioning of the guiding voice within the app was also mirrored through the entire environment and all brand touchpoints. We found in our exploration of the market that synonymous services tended to either ‘own’ the fact their service was a mental health app or disguise it with playfulness, but in all instances they still required the user to admit an emotional issue. Given the associated stigma, it seemed to put up barriers for many of our users. With hold, we try to be honest and clear about the tool rather than being too heavily branded. We reduced clutter, created neutral space and had no tacky characters in an attempt to respect the process that people are going through during use.

Jump to:

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.

Propositions

EQLS

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

Find out how we ‘Reframed the user value hypotheses’.

Jump to:

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

The science behind it

To create an environment that supports self-reflection, we enlisted well established psychological frameworks to underpin the structure and content of the conversations people construct.

The objective is to support the user in different types of reflective practice that can span from simply expressing what is on their mind,  through to critical self-reflection (i.e.self-reflection that is more aware of time, place and context). The ultimate objective is to reveal deeper assumptions that may transform people’s lives.

The prompt questions in the app are designed considering the working memory model to enrich and bolster self-reflection at a cognitive level. This is done by encouraging expression that provokes long-term and short-term memory, audio and visual stimuli as well as multiple modes of thought such as simple expression vs critical thinking  (Baddeley & Hitch‘s (1974) theory of Working Memory). The questions are also tuned to provoke varied modes of language, which help users illustrate their reflections with greater description, narration, examination or consideration, thus creating a deeper, broader engagement with the reflection content. The aim is to encourage greater awareness, control and insight about the reflection, the act of self-reflection and therefore their own thoughts, feelings and behaviours. (Cubero et al., 2008)

Encouraging the user to reflect not just on their situation, but on their understanding of their situation helps build their knowledge of how they think as well as their ability to plan, monitor and assess how they think. This is called meta cognition; it is a skill which may help build people’s emotional resilience and ultimately their ability to control their thoughts and their life.
(Schraw,1994; Schraw,1998; Schraw & Dennison, 1994; Sperling, Howard, Miller, &   Murphy, 2002; Sperling, Howard, Staley, & DuBois, 2004 cited in Hussain: 2015; 134)

Through these models, we refined attributes of the guidance and content in the app as well as established brand positioning and features such as the text-to-voice playback.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Structured Social Judgement

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

Find out how we did ‘Field research’.

The trial

From the 12th December to the 20th January 2019, we ran a trial where we promoted and monitored the app and subsequently conducted a series of interviews with engaged users. From the trial we took five main learnings.

01

The product is desirable

Over the entire period, we had 2712 users with an average of 11.3% of them returning to use the app later. These users completed 1123 conversations consisting of 6497 thought entries (different stages of the conversation). On average, 59% of people who clicked on our adverts downloaded the app. During our most optimised week, we spent £400 on advertising, resulting in 208 fully engaged users costing just £1.25 each to acquire. This high conversion percentage and the low cost of engaging a new user demonstrates that the proposition is highly desirable.

02

Conversations are valued in two distinct ways

There are two distinct ways that people found value in having conversations with themselves. Firstly, the initial expression allows a cathartic unpacking of complex, anxious or out of control thoughts, which provides an in-the-moment release and calm. Secondly, the subsequent extended conversation reframes users’ mindset so they can further understand their context and thoughts, and then potentially progress toward a conclusion —ultimately providing a calming way to process thought and reach new understandings.

03

Revisiting conversations can be challenging but offers reassurance, learning & pride

Different users engage with past conversations in different ways and for different reasons. Some users are intimidated by the intensity of the emotion in their conversations and avoid it to protect themselves; some users want to see their conversations but only when there are enough of them to find bigger insights or to feel proud of how many they have; and finally, some users revisit after each conversation. They return in a calm moment or a stressful moment, but when they do, they often find assurance that they can get through what they are experiencing because they can see the evidence that they have done so before. It also helps them learn and remember what works for them and they often develop a sense of independence, self-reliance and pride.

04

It is valued for being a private, convenient, neutral space to externalise thoughts

We validated that some of the critical attributes we had built into the service were valued by our users. Being able to write and speak thoughts, that were previously internal, helps people process them. And the fact they are stored in the app, lends a welcome sense of weight and significance to the process. Absolute privacy has helped people explore thoughts they wouldn’t have done otherwise and was a critical reason why some adopted the app. Having Hold available at all times created a sense of comfort and made self-reflection more achievable in people’s busy lives. The simplistic nature of the app and the light touch prompts provide structure for people, but leave plenty of room for them to act as they wish, offering a flexibility that respects their process.

05

Our users suffer from anxiety more than we expected

We found that our most frequent users are more anxious than we had previously anticipated. Through previous research we hypothesised that our most likely target user would be someone who is experiencing symptoms of anxiety, but is not formally engaging in professional therapeutic services and does not effectively self-reflect. However, the users engaging the most with the app were often already professionally diagnosed with anxiety type disorders and often had regular therapy. These users tended to prefer the app as a regular mechanism to manage their conditions and in some cases used the app and their conversations to inform their therapy sessions.

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Dimensions of change

Body

Your relationship with your body may be pressurised but you could have more capacity than ever to control it.

Propositions

Mymes

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

Emerging discussions

What has this service taught us more broadly? Beyond simply exploring what self-reflection can mean to people and how they may engage with it in the future, this service raises many new areas of interest with regard to people’s attitudes towards understanding themselves through technology. Below we discuss the service in relation to the original question: How might AI be used to help people gain agency over their lives? We briefly touch on four topics about harnessing valuable formats of interaction, about how people are treating themselves, what people need in exchange for their data and what it means for a service to have an identity and a relationship with its users.

01

Mimicking engrained interactions

This service invites people to act directly to improve the management of their thoughts and their lives. To do this, the core feature available is a small heuristic that mimics a conversation with someone else and in doing so, it insights learning and development. The fact that simply mimicking such an engrained format of communication has helped people engage with and understand complex thought, demonstrates an opportunity to explore co-opting other formats to enrich complex exchanges.

02

People are gaming themselves

In addition to the opportunities for exploring the co-opting of interactions. This heuristic also tells a story of people’s increased understanding and acceptance of their logical inconsistencies in order to help themselves. Simply by mimicking a conversation, this device enables people to overcome stigma and think more clearly, even though they are knowingly participating in an illusion or role play.

This willingness to indulge in an illusion that they are having a conversation with someone else, is an acknowledgement on the part of the user of their own human irrationalities and an awareness of the factious or demanding nature of their thought processes and what conditions are required to unravel a complex personal issue.

This speaks of a humble, pastoral dynamic people have with themselves and a willingness to bring technology into that dynamic, demonstrating a high level of trust in technology. People are essentially saying, ‘I’m unable to think clearly and while I want to speak to someone else that’s not appropriate, however, I can overcome these problems by pretending to have a conversation.’

Is this a sign of an emerging shift in people’s attitudes toward themselves that maturely embraces some of the anomalous irrationalities in human behaviour in order to develop more control and ultimately be happier? Is this a collective increase in meta-cognition? Does it demonstrate a shift in people’s relationship with mental health, the role that technology can have within it and a willingness to game themselves?

03

The price of sharing our data is to be shown ourselves

There is a commonly discussed public concern about companies collecting data about us and the power they may wield as that data enables them to understand us and potentially control us. Yuval Noah Harari speaks of a need to learn and understand ourselves so we cannot be easily manipulated by technology. This dynamic equates to an arms race of knowledge about ourselves. Services such as Hold build both sides of that arms race, enriching the individual and the company with knowledge of the user. Can this growth continue symbiotically? Will us humans reach our capacity too quickly? Will technology always have more scope for growth? Would this be technology companies greatest trick in gaining control?

When asking people what they consider as a fair exchange for sharing data about themselves, they are ostensibly responding by saying that they want the same thing companies do —to understand themselves. Does this mean people do not understand the risks of data sharing or does it represent how much people crave knowledge of themselves?

04

Who is the service?

Another interesting area of discussion that emerges from the service is about the relationship people form with the service as an entity. In this particular situation, the user mentally manifests another entity with whom they directly converse, but the app itself also has an identity. In this case, the identity is intended to manifest as a neutral, trustworthy, informed and non-judgemental presence that lends authority to the space and in turn helps the user respect their own process of reflection. In many emerging therapeutic services, the identity of the service is also the other entity with which a user interacts and converses with.

One of the challenges with designing the ‘Hold’ service was establishing the right positionality of the artificial ‘voice’ in the app (the instructive guide), so that it hosts the user in the space in the correct way allowing them to form the correct relationship with the activities conducted within it. There is a complexity in the interplay and overlapping of the brand of the service, the identity of any voices within it and the space. This complexity was carefully considered for our users, however, as we see more complex services emerge where some of the voices of the service are artificial, directly interacting with users and deeply engaged with a user in a long-term intimate exploration of themselves, there is not only an imperative to fastidiously curate that dynamic on a level not so far paralleled. But there is also a need to consider how these dynamics must be customised for each individual and how these relationships will influence people, perhaps years into a relationship.
Our service represents a willingness on the part of the user to engage with other entities of different, alien characteristics in an emotionally intimate and trusting dynamic. That trusting dynamic is fascinating, filled with potential, powerful and comes with a heavy responsibility

Team
David Freemeyer
Rhea Belani

Other services developed

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.

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.

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

The commoditisation of our needs and values to incentivise behaviour change

Need Commoditisers

Empowering or unsettling intimacy with tech

This category of services identifies a selection of propositions where the value is, in large part, derived directly from educating the user about themselves. We foresee how an increased prevalence of AI in our lives could be used, not just to advise people, but to educate people about themselves in order to expand their personal agency. The sophistication of data collection and analysis and the increasing overlap between services and our lives means that services have huge potential to share their knowledge and expand our capacity through self awareness. However, through the following investigations, we have discussed many ways in which these services must be devised carefully to prevent unintended consequences.

What might be down the path?

One of the first considerations is that digital services are largely based on the ‘app’ market and there may be a perception that apps generally provide extrinsic quick fixes for a small investment.

Apps typically don’t cost a lot of money and most users expect to see quick returns for their time or money. It’s in this backdrop that the market has developed and expectations have been set.

Subsequently, it is plausible that services that help people learn about themselves may suffer, because often those services have to learn about you first or if not they may require you to self-analyse or critically reflect. Essentially, it is difficult for a service to position itself (either through brand of the general positionality of the service) so that it seems serious enough to be respected. but not so serious that it seems like it might ask too much before giving anything back.

While the first consideration is about how to establish users’ relationship with a service, the second is about what shape these new relationships may take. For these services to truly build agency it is important that they or the user correctly balance the involvement of the service in the user’s life, so that happiness is not dependent on the service. They must engage users in such a way that their knowledge of themselves and ability to act on that knowledge is constantly elevated without also damaging people’s existing networks and support systems.

As with all digital services of this nature, it is also important to consider what impact interventions may have if they were to expand massively in scale. Agency building services require self understanding to build self control, but there are different ways of understanding (i.e. western or eastern), which may influence someone’s identity, culture or mental health if extended throughout their life. One could argue that instagram has been a problematic self-understanding tool, because it has influenced some people’s sense of identity by encouraging their comparison with inauthentic representations of others. So, perhaps there should be varied mechanisms for self understanding to offer users choice. Additionally, services may need to be cautious implying good and bad values against a users persona, whether it is with likes, or followers, scores or access. This gamification in such intimate circumstances could have heightened impact.

Within this category of services there is clearly a heightened risk that goes hand in hand  with the increased levels of intimacy in the relationship people have with their technology. However, we can also see a strong set of principles begin to emerge for how technology can offer new intrinsic value to people, that can empower them, build self-assurance, resilience and freedom by strengthening the skills they need to learn for themselves how to live the way they would like to.

Each proposition below is a vehicle which helps us map this territory.

Find out how we ‘Framed strategic questions’ to define the design research.
Read More
01

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.

02

Mymes

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

03

Spark

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.

04

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.

05

Edit

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

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Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

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

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.

Other Proposition types

Proposition Types

Ethics Providers

Platforms as facilitators and brokers of value judgements. It’s possible that in the future we could foresee an advancement of AI with the ability to codify and model the highly complex ethical parameters of everyday life.

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.

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.