AndYou

Emotional Urban Infrastructure

Role: Strategist, Speculative Designer, Fabricator, Systems Researcher

Collaborators: Stephanie Lukito, Elena Habre, Cameron Hanson, Andrea Morales, Gui Curi

Awards: Global Products of Design Fellowship

AndYou was presented to Toshiba and Chiba University as part of the Global Products of Design Fellowship which promotes new ways of designing technology in context. The context we were given was the global, rural to urban migration and we were primarily concerned with urban isolation.

Inspired by city infrastructure like water fountains, AndYou attempts to treat emotion mitigation like waste management. The bollard has a haptic interface that initiates the interaction upon engagement by hands. AndYou collects the emotional data of urban dwellers and acts as a visualizer for the mood of a city. This data can be outputted to light up connected objects which range from pendants to buildings. What does protest look like in the AndYou city?

AndYou is also a mechanism to make a city happier by amplifying the positive emotions of one to many. When someone leaves a negative emotion they are played a positive emotion from someone else. All of this data is collected and machine learning allows its emphatic capacity to increase so it can learn what therapeutic tactics work with which people. In its ideal state, AndYou crowdsources machine feeling and allows city dwellers to speak directly into machine consciousness.

I was instrumental in the development and design of this concept, as well as the creation and testing of early prototypes and probes. I helped fabricate the final post as well as helped shoot and edit the final video on location in Japan. Finally, I scripted the narrative of the final pitch and delivered it with another team member in Tokyo to a packed room of lead product designers from Toshiba. Below is the slide deck of that presentation.