"Declarations of Interdependence" is a series of interactive prototypes that reposition individual and collective roles:

A computer with multi-user keyboard requiring two or three users for operation.
YouByUs, a social media platform in which your profile is crowdsourced by your social network.
A website only accessible by quorum browsing: when a minimum number of users simultaneously connect from the same location.
A machine that monitors group interactions to algorithmically select and visually represent the most dominant individual.

Through these designed experiences, the project questions the centrality of the individual user in the interactions of contemporary social media and human-computer interfaces.

The project was a self-initiated area of research undertaken as the thesis for my MFA in Media Design at Art Center College of Design.

With the rise of communication technologies and social media, one could say that we are more interconnected than ever before; but I was struck by how our interactions and experiences of those connections are discretely individual. Today's user is repositioned as the pivotal hub in their own customized version of the network, which overlaps and interconnects with other network instances, providing every node with a perspective of connectedness that is centered around the individual.

In this context, I was primarily interested in exploring tactics for this “effacement of the self”, designing technologically-mediated social experiences and spaces that offer alternatives to these self-centric interactions. The brief grew around two key challenges: (1) how might I engage an audience of users and designers in this conversation—not just at a conceptual level—but through experiences; and (2) building on this, how might I explore possibilities for alternative interaction design models. Over the following six months, I developed a body of work that injected these new models at various points across the network stack: some emphasize and exaggerate the dominant, individualistic ideology of the social web; others invert these ideological assumptions by exploring group-centered, rather than user-centered, interactions.

At the heart of the project was a criticism of the ideological assumptions that we as designers have built into so many of the systems, interfaces, and devices that are ubiquitous today.

User-Centred Design, the design approach behind many of these products, places the needs and desires of end-users at the centre of the design process. Initially popularized by Donald Norman, this design approach has become central to much contemporary design thinking, particularly interaction design. It centers the design around the user, creating a bespoke world that positions them at its core. It results in interactions, devices and networks that provide an experience of the collective—of the social—that gives the individual ultimate curatorial control. The design process itself embeds this ideological individualism into the very fabric of these systems, technologies and interfaces.

In fact, this can be understood as a neoliberal understanding of the individual: in which individualism, private property and personal responsibility for oneself take precedence over social solidarity. We can recognize a subtle ideological shift from the role of the individual as citizen (contributing to and responsible for a society around them) to the role of the individual as consumer (free to earn and buy the life that they desire). A shift that we as designers are integrating into our assumptions and designs as we define user roles that prioritize the individual over the collective.

My process for this project moved through an extensive series of iterative cycles: from desk research (engaging with a wide range of design, social, and technological theorists); developing my ideas through writing; rapid ideation based on what I might make to investigate these ideas; through to the creation and development of working prototypes that I could put in front of an audience for testing, feedback, and further refinement.

As a designer, I primarily investigate and understand the world around me through making. Throughout the process, I continually furthered my research by giving it form in prototypes, probes, artworks, and designed artifacts. Critical design projects often avoid applying themselves in actual working prototypes; I am interested in the nature of interactions and feel that it is essential to build out working prototypes with which people can engage and interact; offering feedback not just based on what they think of a concept, but also how they experience it.

I also recognized that our interactions with technology don't just happen at the level of the interface, and so I strived to create work that could probe the network stack at various levels: the interactions, the devices, the interfaces, the software, the network connectivity and logic, and the node representations in these networks. Our interactions as they move through these layers, remain entirely discrete, only becoming interconnected at one very controlled point, so I endeavored to create experiences and technical prototypes that placed disruptive and collaborative experiences throughout these layers.

As networked life expands beyond the screen into objects and places, I believe that it is crucial to explore interaction design models that counteract, disrupt, and offer alternatives to this technologically-embedded individualism. As ’social media’ move into shared objects and spaces, there is an exciting potential in interactions that are not limited to my device and your device, my screen and your screen; the possibility of alternative ’social media’ in truly collective, collaborative networked objects and spaces.

This project is an attempt to encourage the design community to move towards more collective understandings of the technologically-mediated social, that don't understand the world through the lens of self-interest (perceiving a user who only possesses desires and preferences) but to design systems that rely on engagement, communication, and a sense of common purpose and identity.