Tale-telling UIs

Remember the ‘search stories’ by Google? It’s so interesting that search queries are actually a tale-telling media. Here I explored a similar method that ‘by seeing what shows on one’s screen you experience their mental status and the hidden stories.’

The Map of Privacy

This a map that gives a brief history of privacy in the technological spectrum, with the section of ‘digital age’ expanded intentionally to outlook the future of privacy based on current phenomena. At the end a new interpretation to ‘privacy’ was given and referred to as ‘permission’, addressing the massive explosion of outdated information we will be facing with the aging of the Internet and ‘cloud data’. Following the current mode of online privacy management, the control over the information will become so costly and time consuming that it is even less efficient compared to the opposite way: giving permission of the information to the trusted groups and individuals. The map also provides clues to why it would be necessary to introduce the forgetting mechanics of online data and to rely partially on the human memory again in order to regulate social behaviors for privacy.

By designing the map, I got to think more critically over the research and ideas I came across before and to situate my design proposals for hiding (marked in red) in relation to other facts regarding privacy.

View original size here

“Bits of Me” here, “Bits of Me” there

This is a study of profile management across various social medias, that involves the collection of the text data(except for their names) from 15 on-line profiles (3 for each subject) and an interpretation of the data from strangers through the portraits they draw of the person based on the profile. With the human “algorithm” on one hand, the data was also parsed through LIWC (a linguistic analysis model) that gives a personality analysis of the text on the other hand.

Interestingly, there is an overall precise match of the disposition between the interpretive drawing and the personality analysis result. And when the data is not enough to make a judgment, people were confused just as the computer does. The two methods also support each other for details they are unable to find out respectively. I found that human drawings tend to make a better guess about the person’s age, and their disposition seems to be based on the looking of some other humans that shares the same features. It is also interesting that when the linguistic analysis shows very low “negative emotions” from the text, the number of positive vs. melancholy looking faces in the drawings are almost even.

Launch the analysis process

So what exactly does it say?

The initial intention of the project is to testify my hypothesis that people use social media to strategically present themselves. And the use of one media is complementary and influenced by the rest.

Most of the persons I studies have a high awareness of “what in where”, that is separating the information about themselves in different categories and share them via different networks, and also “how to put”, that is organizing how the same information is stated differently on various media.

There is only one person who has told me before that her Facebook self barely represent her in reality, whose result has shown a consistent pattern throughout all of her networks. In that case, she has done a good job keeping the actual self away from the medias, while still keeping her image consistent.

Work-in-Progress Exhibition at Art Center

Can repeating the same things 14 times to 14 people help creating a better thesis?

I still need to figure why Art Center adopts such way of getting your work critiqued, but… as a result, I did kill my thesis in some way, as I realized the inconsistency between my projects is so huge that I struggled to state them across a single message.

But right after, a new thesis was born on top of the big mess I made…

Good bad news.