Me and My Smartphone - The influence smartphones have on our lives

Abstract

Smartphones have become an inseparable gadget and beneficial tool in our lives. Imagining a future without them would truly be impossible. When a new technology arrives, society needs time to adjust and become aware of the impact products have on people and our ways of behaving.. This always takes time. In the case of smartphones, the last few years have shown a growing amount of literature, media, researchers and most successful people in the world give attention to the negative effects and developments smartphones and social media has had on many people around the world. This thesis did even so, but has as final goal to create awareness, stir debate and provoke reflection within the audience about the subject. To do so we used design as tool. This particular movement is called Critical Design. Through an extensive literature research the present effects and developments in different areas of expertise were identified, such as the cognitive area, psychological, physiological, and social. From a user study empirical data related to the matter was collected, the way people feel, think and experience their own relationships to their phones. Combined, these scientific findings led to five interesting themes that we transformed into a smartphone manifesto, which could then be used as basis for the idea generation. The Social Paradox, The Loss of Solitude, Your Internal Friction, Your Divided Attention, The Addiction. For each theme, one design has been made. The final outcome of this thesis is a collection of five critical designs, from which three have been developed into prototypes. As part of these designs, narratives have been created in the form of commercial like videos, setting the context and adding to the completeness of the design concepts. By combining personal perceptions towards society with scientific evidence and empirical data, a translation from a very scientific background towards a more artistic way of designing was made. There was no prior process similar to the one taken in this thesis, which allowed a very open, new and free way of going through the design process. In a qualitative final evaluation, 8 people were interviewed in order to find out if the critical designs provoked them and created critical reflections towards our own behaviors and relations to smartphones within society.