MRes Design Grand Challenge: Neo-Wellbeing

MRes

Summary

Neo-Wellbeing focuses on the negative side effects of digital interactions, increasing the risk of developing mental health disorders. Recent research, like Productivity gains from teleworking in the post COVID-19 era, a policy response from OECD shows that teleworking has a risk of hindering people's wellness at the same time while having a possibility to increase work efficiency. Our way is to present an unsafe future in the current horizon, to prevent any potential future misuse of technology and design for a safer future. The dystopian scenario serves to raise awareness and discussion on the importance of actively monitoring whose interest technology is serving, as well as the related consequence in order to avoid itself from coming true.

In the Grand Challenge on Design for Safety, we present a website simulating a speculative dystopian narrative to provide the audience with a glimpse of a possible future where workers have accepted wearable technological implants measuring working efficiency. A short film visualises the evolution of this dystopian future projected to the 2040-2050 decade to offer viewers an immersive experience of this unsafe scenario in which an online self-defence underground community. The fictional characters in the film reflect the direction of Neo-Wellbeing to build a safer future by experiencing various contents on the community's website.

Timeline of speculated world

Research methods

Underground website

Introduction film

Role-play film