Interactive Technology Design course
in collaboration with Braun
Ready for Your Tea?
2023
Supervisor: Maria Luce Lupetti
Collaborators: Aayushi Gupta, Avisha Arali, David Cheng
Do you want to be healthier and more sustainable? Then Subscribe!
Every morning, your smart kettle comes to life, knowing your preferences like an old friend. With a touch of magic, it effortlessly brews your perfect cup of tea and gives you the best personalised health tips. With each passing day, your bond with this intelligent companion deepens, as if it has a deep understanding of your desires. It's more than a partnership, it's a harmonious coexistence.
The future of healthy and smart living is here, and it starts with a single subscription.
Smart products are our most loyal companions. They keep track of all our preferences and even tell us when we need to change our lifestyle. By observing us every day, they learn who we are and slowly learn our daily routines, taking every opportunity to make sure we don't have to do things manually. We know that AI is useful in this way, really optimizing our sense of autonomy.
In this project, we are exploring how smart products can 'truly' improve and enhance our lives for the 'better', removing the need to make important decisions to maintain our lifestyles and making them impossible to live without.
How can we create critical discussions about the nature of smartness, ethics of data, and consumer capitalism?
Our main criticism relates to users' awareness of privacy and how they may be subconsciously encouraged to use more smart products under the guise of promoting sustainable and healthy living. Our interaction scenario, using methods such as nudging and anthropomorphism, combined with advanced technology such as sensors, allowed us to effectively communicate our idea to users in a way that engaged them without raising suspicions about the potential threats involved.
Through this experience, we want to encourage users to critically examine their relationship with smart products by shedding light on the hidden aspects of this dynamic. While we present our scenario as a future projection, it is important to note that the nexus between companies, smart products, and sharing personal data (including through social media applications) already exists today, often without our awareness. Our product and envisioned interaction scenarios serve as a commentary on the potential trajectory of this trend, where individuals may be increasingly incentivized or coerced to adopt more smart products while being misled by large tech companies that capitalize on people's lifestyle choices and daily habits.
By highlighting these concerns, we hope to encourage users to think about the potential consequences of accepting a future in which personal information is widely shared and exploited, and to approach the adoption of smart products and technologies with a critical mindset.
