How might we reimagine our present value system as a means for empathy, compassion and welfare?

Role: user researcher, communication designer, strategist

Skills: secondary research, analysis and synthesis, low & high fidelity prototyping, diagramming, systems design, interaction design

Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Indesign, Sketch, Principle

Team: Individual, with support from instructor

An expanded definition of our economy

Context

This project had a different beginning. I really appreciated when our professor prompted the class with the endeavor of looking within to bring our essence out through a particular design. What matters to me more than anything else? Where do my deepest interests lie? How can I use technology to expose my ethos? What is something that should exist in the world that I could bring to life?

Reflections

I dug deeper and deeper and deeper. Introspection has done a lot for me in the past and, at times, I intentionally separate time and space to abstract myself from the present to look inward. But I’ve never reached such depths. How did I come to exist? What was relevant for my parents? What was my upbringing like? Why did I major in Economics? Why did I quit my previous jobs? Why Design school?

With these questions in mind I decided to do research on myself: my past, present and future self. One peculiarity about me is that I’m a documenter of references. Every time I have a conversation with someone, there’s a notebook in which I add information to: names of people, organizations, books, etc. Yet, I only add information that’s interesting to me at that moment. I enjoy preserving information. I believe I will draw patterns with that data in due time.

Another distinct element to take into account is the intentions and passion that guided my professional path, from an investment fund to a digital transformation consultancy to an education nonprofit. In time, I realized that I needed to dedicate my time and effort to work that would impact the lives of others directly, especially those with limited resources and opportunities. I strive for social impact. I daydream about more equitable, anti-racist and healthy societies.

An alternate value system

I dove deeper still. I started to acknowledge the stuff that made me angry about the world today. Extreme wealth, greed, vanity, racism and the myriad manifestations of intolerance, alongside many others. I found myself thinking about Latin America, my continent. Its people, its challenges, its future.

Developing nations have a wealth distribution problem. The lack of resources or accurate policies for their distribution refrains millions from achieving welfare. I believe that is real because the definition of wealth is limited to the monetary dimension. The intention behind my work became to provide a framework for a separate, complementary welfare system, based on an inseparable dimension of human condition: feelings. To be able to externalize and crystallize them could move us closer to a more understanding, empathetic society. That’s when my passion for storing information started to make sense.

What if I could aggregate people’s feelings using technology and assign a proper value to them?

Outcomes

1. A new value system

An alternate system that would value feelings at least as importantly as money. It would complement the existing capitalistic system and provide people with the basic conditions to achieve emotional wellbeing. 

How would it work? Residents of a particular geographic area would be able to donate their specific feelings about certain experiences to others. A multidisciplinary team of volunteers - artists, philosophers, technologists, linguists, psychologists, and more - would be able to access the encrypted feelings to gauge (and modulate, if needed) their honesty. Depending on who the recipients are, they would have access to these feelings: non-anonymous donations to family members, and anonymous ones to other residents of the same area. The system would aggregate the latter and recommend feelings to certain residents depending on the challenges they are facing in their lives.

In the future, these memory spaces from around the world would be interconnected and their residents’ feelings would be available to anyone, anywhere, provided that they could find comfort through them. The system would enable and build collective empathy.

2. fac.mus

Where would it work? fac.mus is the factory-museum, a physical space that residents can visit anytime they want. It fulfills two purposes: the factory, to provide residents with the proper technology to record their feelings and aggregate them; and the museum, to showcase aggregations of feelings from residents to other residents. 

The fac.mus is divided into three separate parts: the donation area (brown); the customized, individual area to experience donations from family members (green); and the curated, collective area to experience donations from other residents (orange).

3. myelins

myelins are physicalizations of the feelings of people in a particular community. I named them after the insulating material that reinforces neural connections in brain cells. The technical system captures the voice of donors and runs sentiment analysis to their words; later, it assigns values to feelings and depicts them in a tangible, colored object which the recipients of the donation - or an aggregation of donations - will then experience. myelins hold the power of feelings while they overcome their ephemerality.

Equity-centered societies

The process of registering feelings is relieving, cathartic for a donor. Knowing that that feeling is helping a fellow community member overcome a time of emotional distress can give the potentially painful donation a larger purpose. 

For recipients, the possibility of seeing and touching the feelings of others can help them understand what they are going through or, even better, what they will go through. Feelings registered by different donors that pertain to a similar local event will be crystallized in a communal myelin that groups of people in the community can engage. myelins are prompts for a more comprehensive attitude towards ourselves and more empathetic behavior towards others.

Should this system be installed, every human in the world would be able to create wealth and pass it on to their community, as well as receive it from them. An expanded, purest state of welfare would exist.

Others: Research

To come up with myelins and the new system I dived into separate subjects, with various levels of depth. Memory objects, data physicalizations like quipus, sentiment analysis, speech recognition software, inheritance laws, the future of learning, Native American and Aboriginal cultures like the Tunumiit of Ammassalik, lineage, ethos capturing, biomedical sensors, memory sharing, data visualization, thought-provoking objects like the Rosetta Stone and Moon Ark projects, inspiring artists like Adrien Segal and Jessica Charlesworth, monetary theory, value networks, systems design, and many, many others. 

Demo

I created a short video that illustrates the interaction between someone who recently moved to a new city and the system within the local fac.mus.