the Smell of Home
Response
01
Shopper's
Regret Simulator
This project is a shopping regret simulation game that displays different types of consumer regrets and the reasons behind them through various scenarios in the virtual shopping process. The project aims to draw attention to the psychological problem of buyer's regret caused by cognitive dissonance and reduce the occurrence of purchasing behaviors may lead to regret.
Problem Discovery and Project Positioning
In China, I discovered numerous online anti-consumerism groups. By observing and studying the posts within these groups, I found that members realized their consumption behavior caused psychological stress, including anxiety from excessive consumption, debt pressure, and identity confusion. They sought help from strangers to alleviate these feelings. A notable phenomenon in these groups is people asking others whether they should make a purchase, experiencing cognitive dissonance even before buying. They attempt to preemptively feel regret to reduce impulsive buying. This phenomenon provided a crucial reference for my subsequent design. Ultimately, I focused on the emotion of regret and expanded my target audience. This includes not only those who have already experienced consumer regret but also those who have yet to recognize their potential regret.
Functionality
The functionality of the game is reflected in two aspects: educational function and scenario reenactment.
Educational Function: By simulating shopping scenarios, the game helps users identify common factors that lead to consumer regret.
Scenario Reenactment: Through the game, users can play the role of customers, experience the shopping process in different situations, and feel the influence of selling skills on decision-making. In the actual situation such words are no longer so blunt, often such inducement is mainly reflected in the discounts and more hidden visual language, I attempted to such word in the simulation game more exaggerated display.
Audience
My audience is consumers, as to whether consumer regret possesses a geopolitical dimension, or whether it has a uniqueness for Chinese consumers. Based on the geopolitical context of different countries, the definition of consumerism varies. I do not focus on the specific consumption patterns of different countries, but rather reflect on consumption behavior from the perspective of cognitive behavioral science and psychology. And emotions like regret are very much common to all human beings.
https://shoppersregretsimulator.cargo.site/
02
How to Preserve
the Smell of Home
Guidebook for Recording Significant Spaces to Improve Homesickness for People Who Have Moved or Lived Away for long Time.
At the beginning of my work, I aimed to create a "Guidebook for Recording Significant Spaces to improve Homesickness for People Who Have Moved or Lived Away for a Long Time." After a series of interactions and surveys with the audience, narrowed down the theme to "How to Preserve the Smell of Home," focusing specifically on the home.
I collected descriptions of the smells of home from people in similar situations and combining them with my own experiences, created a comprehensive process for recording home. I turned this process into a book documenting the steps. It will be a guide to recording a home's smell, and reproduction of the smell through making perfumes.
03
Supernatural Phenomenon
Emergency
Response
Yi Sun/ Yixiao Zhu/ Yuqing Xue/ Yuanyuan Wang/ Jingyi Liu
My team explored the communication state with artificial intelligence, and for most people, talking with AI to get a series of outputs seems almost like magic. Through such associations, we illustrated the potential connections between humans and silicon-based life in a small-scale exhibition. In our imagination, human beings and silicon-based lifes are two very different creatures, and the process of our contact with such species is bound to have countless unexpected additional products and unexpected of phenomena. The inevitable complexity of the outcome of such exchanges is our link and metaphor for the connection between ordinary people and AI. This exhibition includes sculptures, interactive projections, experimental effects, and manuals.
I was responsible for all language creation and manual production. This manual is one of the basic languages designed by our team, which records the process of communication between silicon-based life and us, like a mysterious archive. In my opinion, language serves as an important bridge for communication between two species, and at the same time, it also offers us a very good perspective for imagining silicon-based life. Conceptually, the manual shows an attempt by silicon-based life forms to transcribe their language, resulting in intermediary products due to drastically different linguistic systems. It's not exactly the language of silicon-based life as we think it is, nor is it our language. I created it based on the most common language, English, with 26 letters and a few basic symbols. It is a language composed of signal points and arcs, serving as one of the fundamental logic for our space design, It's also a virtual archive.
In the initial stage of the design process, I asked ChatGPT a series of questions, covering questions like "What are the most commonly used words?" and "If silicon-based lifes could speak, what would they say?" Subsequently, I compiled ChatGPT's responses and compiled them into this manual, focusing on designing words such as "human," "language," "time," "world," "male," and "female." In terms of storytelling, I arrange these letter-like patterns into dynamic forms that may appear in space, which I call words. Then repeating these dynamic basic patterns (words) in certain paths to form complex pattern combinations into more rhythmic patterns I call sentences. Such patterns can completely be reconstructed into human syntax, expressing meaning in the sequence of letters-words-sentences-articals, making it easy to understand and forming a more rigorous system. This group of languages can be seen as evidence of attempted communication between humans and non-humans. It shows the existing elements of human language (letters make up words, words make up sentences, sentences make up texts ), as well as the components of language that humans do not use. This language visually forms patterns, the more it says, the harder it is to understand. These patterns are rooted in human language but exhibit imagination towards the syntax of non-human languages.