Ideal You
How might we enable users to have control over how digital services interpret their actions and show them content based on that?
Done as part of a school course “Fluid Assemblages”, this critical project aims at making the invisible visible.
Taking Facebook as the first platform for intervention, Ideal You aims to make visible the workings of the profiling algorithms that make decisions for users. Also, by giving control to the people, the dynamics between Facebook, users and advertisers shifts the power more to the user.
MY ROLE
Conceptualisation, graphic design, prototyping, testing
TEAM
Zhi Wang
Guides
Christoffel Kuenen, Heather Wiltse
Key features
STAKEHOLDERS and service blueprint
The various human and non human nodes involved in the system that play a part in the dynamic changes that take place once the user intervenes with Ideal You.
PROBING AND TESTING
Various preliminary lo-fi and hi-fi concepts were used to understand the usability concerns users may have. However, this also helped us learn more about the nuances of the project and the topic itself.
EXHIBITION
As part of the final deliverable, we were to put up an exhibition that takes people through the idea and also makes them interact with an Ideal You worksheet - an analog version of the dashboard.
WHAT HAPPENS LATER?
We hope that as the system grows and users’ preferences are updated, advertisers are also forced to change their strategies. This is shown in this fictitious article by Business Insider.