A recording implant from a speculative future in which humans rely upon technological assistance to remember their own experiences. An exploration of large-scale data management, novel interfaces, privacy, and ethics.
Sep–Nov 2024
Raven is a neural-augmentation device that is consensually inserted into participants' brains to record every single moment of their lives. The digital-biological integration allows the user to navigate the interface by moving their pinky over their thumb.
Raven has two distinct modes: Record and Sort. In the day-to-day, Raven defaults to Record. Then, all manipulation of recorded content occurs in Sort. The various functions within each mode live in a vertical stack, allowing the user to swipe up and down to access them.
The landing screen for the sorting interface, launched by the command, "Hey Raven", is a map that highlights the path taken by the user during their entire day. The user may pick through their Bookmarked Moments of the day to view details and sort them into custom folders.
Once sorted, the data becomes accessible through the Library, which organizes the moments by custom folders, people, locations, and date. Folders and individual moments can be shared with other people who are also registered with Raven.
The Analytics page provides breakdowns of the user's activity, identifying the places, people, and moments that they interact with most often. This feature is part of Raven’s automated analytics system, which collects empirical data about the user’s life to eliminate the need for reflective thinking.
Analytics offers customizable time periods as well as a Lifetime view, which includes two additional metrics: the percentage of the user’s life documented by Raven and their engagement compared to all Raven users. These percentage-based stats are designed to motivate continued usage.
In cases which require confidentiality, moments recorded in Incognito Mode still appear in the Library but are not shareable with others. The color red appears exclusively in Incognito to signal an altered state and to ensure that the user will not forget to turn it off.
We anticipate our entry point into the consumer market being white-collar professionals in corporate environments, as Raven is inherently a response to the capitalist demands of society. With even small-scale adoption, we see major adoption because of the competitive advantage it provides to its user. Of course, this is dystopian thinking—so with heavy emphasis on the speculative and experimental nature of the project we hoped to undertake, we came up with...
The real-time user feedback we received while pitching and user-testing was overwhelmingly concerned with the discomfort of always being recorded by others. We chose to lean into this phenomenon, as we recognized it as a central theme. While traditional surveillance has been largely invisible to the public, Raven's live-recording capabilities make this process hypervisible. This shift raises questions about ethics and privacy: What happens when large-scale, impersonal government monitoring becomes personal? When individuals, instead of being passive subjects of surveillance, become the active curators of their own data? What are the psychological and societal implications of knowing that every moment of your life is being recorded and analyzed by a system designed to optimize and "perfect" your experience?
With the rise of the digital age, humans have begun to externalize our cognitive memory through photos, videos, and auto-generated metadata—a practice which helps us recall the things that we've done and the way they made us feel without engaging in the practice of reflection and retelling that has historically upheld memory retention. While we capture moments from our lives more than ever, these moments function more as data points to help describe our lives rather than the result of a conscious effort to cherish our lived experiences. This externalization of memory is our first point of interest.
Our second point of interest is that humans are built to optimize—and if we are able to Google the answer to something in a matter of seconds, then there is no reason for our brains to ever commit that answer to memory. My partner and I drew from findings that the Internet has negatively altered humans' attentional capacities, memory processes, and social cognition to examine how digital tools shape the way we perceive, process, and preserve our experiences.
Taking the speculative nature of this project as an opportunity to thrust a more critical lens upon technology, we rooted our initial explorations within academic research. This allowed us to set up a developmental framework that was still relevant to current issues.
...is crucial! While the speculative nature of this product allowed us the creative liberty to push the capabilities of tech beyond our own levels of comfort as an academic exercise, here are the safeguards we would have put in place to ensure that Raven is ethical, inclusive, and accountable.
We initially envisioned two entry points to each Bookmarked Moment: one through tapping to view its details, and another through a quick-action haptic touch.
But as we started wireframing, the two became redundant, as they both led to the main call-to-action of sorting. So we revised. This is the simplified flow we designed for:
Despite the possibilities offered by an XR/MR interface, which supports dynamic screen sizes and non-rectangular shapes, we chose to constrain the design to a singular, rectangular interface to mitigate dizziness and confusion (and to MAYA principle our way past the more radical parts of our design).
We also decided early on to base the sorting interface around a map of the user's journey from the day because it was the easiest way to accessibly visualize an entire day's worth of time—the user is more likely to remember moments from the day based on location than any other metric, they can pick a location from any time without digging through tables of data, and they can get a rapid overview of their daily physical journey at a single glance.
As we iterated, we played around with various ways to transition from a macro to micro view of the same information.
