DOCUMENTATION OF PROGRESS PDF: THALIA_WEEK 4_Progress
For this week,
- I tested the idea of the little value social media companies accord to human life further, by using more expensive candies and including bar graphs showing an average daily revenue of these companies in million of candies.
- Made some changes to the nutrition label. Instead of using calories to communicate the unhealthiness of consumption, I’m using ingredients. Our time can be perceived as the ingredient of the revenues we generate to social media companies.
- Made some user testing by interviewing friends who know nothing about my project.
- Created mockups in the exhibition space.
- I tested Nasia’s clever idea of reversing the process using the same metrics; instead of filling bags with candies, the more the users spend time on social media, the more he/she gets candies removed from his candy bag. This idea unfortunately didn’t work.
- Emerging last minute idea: using calories as a metric. (If I decide to focus on the accumulation of candies idea)
Mockups:
If I still decide to focus on the idea I presented last week
The first thing the audience sees is a panel showing the graphs and the conversion app’s QR code. I’m not sure yet if I want my audience to purchase candies or return them. But either way I don’t want to give candies away for free otherwise candies will be perceived as a reward. In the counter, I was thinking of having 4 different piles, each representing the value of one month of our lives to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat. The piles losing volume suggest how these companies are robbing our lives.
If I go back to my initial idea of the accumulation of candies
The display is the same, however people don’t pay for the candies, they’ll be returned, and a bag showing the average user’s daily consumption will be shown on a plinth. The message on the panel is different.
Test of Nasia’s suggestion
I have tried to quantify our average daily waking hours (17 hours) into one bag of candy. The more the consumption increases, the less time (and calories) from our waking up hours is left in the bag. I replaced unhealthy calories with healthy ones, as a metaphor of our well-being being robbed by social media companies. Unfortunately, this idea didn’t work because of the non-uniformity of the metrics; some social media companies value our time more than others, and not everyone uses everyone uses the same social media apps at the same frequency. As a result, I noticed disparities in the amount of candies left in the bag from one user to the other. For instance, one user who spent 526 minutes on social media got 6 candies removed from her bag while someone else with a smaller consumption of 365 minutes got 7 candies removed from her bag.
Emerging idea
I find the minimum wage to be a very interesting working metric. However, if its use in my piece is problematic, I can use calories as a metric. For instance, knowing that the recommended daily screen time limit is of 2 hours and the recommended nutritional intake is 2000kcal a day, we can associate 2 hours of social media to an accumulation of 2000 calories of candies. With that option however you would get less candies than with the minimum wage but there would still be an accumulation depending on the type of candy. I haven’t done enough tests to confirm it.
