Having created VisuaLIESations of the lie data that we tracked, we went into the next phase of the project, the Haptification. How could our data be presented in 3D as something that can be explored visually, but especially by touching and feeling it?
Material Research
To find an answer to this question, we started looking for all kinds of materials. We brainstormed together and read various papers on material usage in data physicalization. Furthermore we collected ideas by just actively perceiving what is around us while taking a walk along the Isar or at home exploring the basement or looking through the craft drawer. A short summary of the outcome of this research is shown in the following graphic:
Next, we started thinking, which of these materials could best represent the different dimensions of our data. As described in our previous post, there are many different aspects of a lie that can be considered. These aspects we specified as dimensions in the previous phase. But since we came up with quite a lot, we narrowed them down to the following four: the heaviness and intention of a lie, the target of a lie, which is the person that was lied to, and the distance from truth.
Matching the materials and the dimensions of lies
How can the properties of the different materials be used to bring across these dimensions in a haptification? For this, we again did a brainstorming session to collect our various imaginations. We had the idea to include light in our installation since light often is a symbol for the truth. One of our first prototypes was one big light bulb with different pieces of materials on it, which we discarded because we wanted to include more haptification. The following sketch shows our iteration process of the prototypes.
The way we came up with the final prototype version was to match the material properties to the dimensions we specified, for example: material can be cold or warm and the temperatur could be a good indicator for the intention, since it is also binary and warmth is usually positively associated and cold negatively. Similarly, we proceeded with the other dimensions and this way came up with a certain material respectively:
With these materials with dimensions, we built the prototype:
What do we want to achieve with our haptification?
That’s all nice and good, but maybe you already asked yourself: ok, but how is this supposed to be used and why? Since tracking someone’s lies is clearly ethically critical we see our haptification not as something that is actually used in practice, but as a critical design installation. Critical design objects are not necessarily realistic, but are more there to stimulate the audience to question why things are the way they are. We want to install our haptification publicly in neighborhoods in front of every household so that everyone can see how much the people living there are lying or, in a broader sense, how trustworthy a neighborhood is. Given this scenario, how would people’s behavior change? How does it affect people’s conversations? Would people stop lying? On the one hand, it is very interesting to detect lies, but on the other hand, do we always want to know when someone is lying? It would be interesting to see how conversations would change. If we could detect them, will we start overthinking asking a question because of the fear to be lied to? If everyone has good “lights”, so don’t lie much, is it because there are less lies or just less questions because of the fear? We want to get people thinking about such “systems” and how they are going to affect our society. Our idea was inspired by the social credit system in China [1,2]. There, every citizen is given a social credit score and depending on what they did, the score will increase and decrease. With this system they want to provide the trustworthy with benefits and discipline the untrustworthy worthy. So, transferring this to our neighborhood, it might make the people there think about it and it would also help other people, that get in contact with the neighbourhood, to adjust their behavior.
All this might sound pretty abstract and therefore we created a sketch of the scenario. It shows the neighborhood with the light bulb installation in front of the houses.
In order to detail the application scenario and think of how people could use it, we came up with 4 personas, which you can see in the next graphic.
The next stage will be the physicalization of our project. Coming from our Haptification Prototype, we will add some technologies to show different dimensions. We already have an idea, but will present it later on.
[2] https://merics.org/en/report/chinas-social-credit-system-2021-fragmentation-towards-integration