Infuse
How would global nomads feel at home in a foreign culture?
This is the Master Thesis project for Interaction Design. The project aims to cause a moment of reflection on one’s cultural infusion through the probe of an interactive service.
People are moving away from their home cultures more and more in search of a better life. These moves can be challenging in practical, emotional and cultural identity terms. Having moved through many cultures myself, I have found that my cultural identity is in a constant flux and I slowly shift my belonging from place to place. Each person’s way of finding home is different in a new culture. Infuse follows this journey as people go from culture to culture in search of their ‘at home’ feeling.
MY ROLE
Research, ideation, visual design, prototyping, testing, movie making
Collaborators
IKEA, IDEO
Guides
Niklas Andersson, Nicholas Toretta, Marco Guadarrama, Chris Nyffler
Home is not where
you are from,
it is where
you belong
Some of us
travel the whole
world to find it
- Beau Taplin
infuser stories
How Infuse manifests in its users lives is what really shows how people find home in a new culture. They might want to integrate, keep all parts of their cultural identity alive or choose to not integrate at all. All these are valid ways of finding home and begs to ask the question how would you find yours?
Key features
INfuse MAP
An ever changing graphic that represents the person’s evolving cultural identity. This is how the system knows and interprets the person’s every choice. This map can be used to compare the person’s own culture with other city cultures and understand where they resonate the most. The four parameters are based on Hofstaede’s Cultural Compass.
Infuse CQ
A cultural AI that helps the person with the relevant local cultural information. As the system starts to know the person, it knows if you want things from your home culture or want to explore the new one or something completely different.
Infuse advisors
Real people wanting to help other global nomads to find their bearings in new cultures. These can be people living in the place of culture or people who belong to those cultures and feel like they can give back.
system model and screen flow
The basic system model and screen flow showing the way the user is connected to the different parts of Infuse and how the information flows. Wireframing was done to roughly understand the structure of the Infuse app that would come together later in the whole flow.
Research and testing
A design ethnographic approach was taken to get an understanding of this very emotional and vague space. I looked at journeys of people who are long term immigrants, recent global nomads and even refugees. This helped me arrive at the four main challenges they go through while settling in a new culture. To test, story prototyping was devised to provoke testers with narratives and cause a reflection through the stories.
EXHIBITION
To create a moment of reflection, the final exhibition asks questions. One poster described the concept while the other shows how different people have different Infuse Maps. How would yours look like? An interactive prototype takes the person through questions and generates one for them. This could be taken away as a card.
