The purpose of this project is to identify and study a digital behaviour we experience in our daily lives. Its reformulation will make us aware about its implications in our society. Once studied, we create a prototype of a critical artifact which makes an interaction with the user using a tangible interface made with Arduino.
When we use our phones and interact with social media, we assume that we can control our doings; that we decide what to do at what time. Behind that, there is a whole mechanism that functions with the purpose of making us stick to it as long as possible while analyzing our digital behaviour. One of the examples would be the infinite scroll mechanism.
The project wants to open the users’ eyes that every digital addiction can be caused by just a simple movement; in this case, the finger scroll. This action reverses the roles of control, where the machine ends up taking control of us.
After a deep study about the effect of the infinite scroll in our daily lives, the artifact was sketched and prototyped using different libraries in Arduino. The displayed message in the LCD Screen says “you control me but I will never stop controlling”. This way, when it starts over, the sentence will seem like an endless one, just like a loop in social media.
Daniel Armengol
Raúl Goñi (Goñi Studio)