I’m designing and building my first prototype, with some inspiration and advice from Adrian Westaway of Vitamins. When designing for design research, Adrian suggested, “try to design a journey to take them (participants) on”. Yesterday, I created 6 Gmail accounts, 5 ifttt accounts, 50 ifttt tasks to send emails from 5 of the newly created Gmail accounts to 1 “master” Gmail account (This sentence could’ve been written in code).
All the repetition set up a prototype that tracks participants’ production and distribution of public digital content. Using the collected data, I plan to publicly display behaviors such as amounts of tweets, uploaded photos, and status updates with Legos. Yes, Legos, a physical embodiement of data and my childhood. With insight from my survey, I will also be equating each behavior with a CO2 emission, updating up the totals daily to the physical display as well as an online component.
With this prototype, I hope to test a few biases/assumptions:
- The quantified feedback should positively impact participants’ production and distribution of online content.
- The public display will create a “shaming” effect: first with the sheer amounts of conent being produced by each participant and secondly with the subsequent creation of CO2 emissions.
- By observing each participants display, non-participants will have an increased awareness of their own online habits and CO2 emissions.
- Incentive to conserve does not have to involve monetary motivation, and can be based solely on normative comparison to similar groups of people.
