Beyond the product / Service envy

Process
working with live|work and Olivetti Technost

This project was developed under the tutoring of Lavrans Lovelie Chris Downs and Ben Reason from live|work London.
They, as service designer, suggested us the tecnique of fake evidences to get in touch immediately with the social and individual consequences of a service.
The background technology we had to enhance with an innovative service was the security system developed by Olivetti Technost.

Inspirations


We as a class discuss a lot about security, throwing out some verbs to represent it. I concentrate in particular on these:
not feeling alone, to connect, to mother.
Another inspiration came from Banana Yoshimoto's book "Deep Sleep", where she speaks about a woman that has a strange job: she is a "sleeping partner" for people that are scared during the night.

Starting concept


My starting point was the idea to take care not of objects but of the emotional space at home: the confort and warmth, the sound and the smell, the memory and subjective value in every object.
How to preserve them?
How to preserve them in me?
How to take care of myself when I scared and don't feel that confort around me?
My idea was to basically misdirect the fear enhacing the ambient around me and feeling the precence of someone else taking care of me.
I got stuck for a long time on the concept in itself because I couldn't decide wheter was useful a machine or a human interface. After long talk with Lavrans and Chris I decided write a story that could contain one of the solution: a human interface through a video and a community of users.

Fake evidences


Building fake evidences of the concept allowed me to get rid of the it and look at it from out of the box, making me more critical.
First of all I wrote an article [see Scenario] supposing the service was already there, trying to imagine the story and the immediate consequences.
After I developed the website (faking an existing one) of the doctor who started the community.
Then I shot a video (from the viewer point of view) of myself having a bad night. In the video, through an indicator, you can see how the system tune the ambient around me when I'm nervous and when a voice try to calm me down.


Next step


I think as a next step I've to deepen my knowledge of the social interaction through a machine in such an intimate space and find out more on affective computing and how machine can effectively recognize our emotions.

Applications


_a broadband service for taking care of your health
_an affective computing application to model your emotional space

 
  concept     scenario     process