Fog.ai

Role: Speculative Design Lead, Cognitive Interface Designer

Collaborators: Jiyeon Kang, Jungsoo Park, Jason brogan

Fog.ai was created as part of a five week design sprint for a collaborative lab put on by IBM, Bell Labs, and Parsons School of Design. The final project was presented in front of designers from IBM, Microsoft, Bell Labs, Frog, and Viacom. A short film is still in production demonstrating more concretely interaction would really be like.The project was primarily an experiment in cognitive interfaces and machine-vision aesthetics. 

In this near-future world, AI has become a facilitator of happiness. It has learned your habits, and it tries to guide your life experience to be most enjoyable. As a result, it automates many decisions, limiting your recommendations to only those you will undoubtedly like. While general happiness has increased, so has complacency and ignorance. Guided by AI since childbirth, many people lack an understanding of choice, identity, or open-mindedness. They haven't had to make decisions without the guard rails of AI. The AI affirms and pushes your habits into a more perfect model. Often, dates are set up, products are ordered, menu items recommended, and disappointment is at an all-time low. In a world in which AI is constantly limiting our choices, trying to make us better versions of ourselves, but storing our selfhood in a black box, what might constitute an alternative use of AI? What if AI existed to help us know ourselves less? In this world exists a subculture of cognitive drift. These people amble through life, floating down streets, from decision to decision, seemingly lost, but truthfully comfortable in embracing uncertainty. They have hacked their AIs to unplan their experience, cracking the black box of AI-determined selfhood, and seeking liberation from becoming more perfect models.

We externalized the interaction between self and the AI, so that you can see what is happening and learn to understand those mechanisms. It allows for self reflection on your machine-human interaction.