We're at the dawn of an AI revolution, when clever machines will accelerate us to a more meaningful society: Freeing up our potential so we can focus on what's important, guiding us so we can tackle what matters to us, and expanding our horizons so we can achieve what was once impossible.

But what might that feel like? HyperHuman is a speculative design exploration celebrating the immense potential benefits that intelligent machines can bring to our lives, our work, and our society.

IDEO created a near-future fictional environment with five working prototypes of machines that visitors could interact with and experience. These machines explored how humans' purpose would evolve in the future in an ever-changing technologically driven world, how they could communicate with each other in a way that's attuned to personal and cultural nuances, and other questions surrounding beliefs, creativity, and expertise.

In this extrapolated future where AI is omnipresent, visitors to the exhibition were able to experience how machine intelligences could be used to amplify human strengths and personal qualities; and how to view machines as collaborators - to essentially augment their own humanity.

IDEO created a near-future fictional environment with five working prototypes of machines that visitors could interact with and experience. Encased in mirrored boxes inside an asymmetric "forest of augmented intelligence", each machine had its own station, for visitors to experience one by one. A collaboration between IDEO's Munich, London, and Chicago studios - this speculative exploration was focused on highlighting how AI could be used in the future to amplify human potential.

This was also embodied in the approach we took to building these machines - from creating datasets from scratch out of curated literature and jazz lyrics and by asking strangers to write love letters personifying specific emotions; to running simulations of economic events happening in a hypothetical world. Each machine itself was innovative technology rooted in nostalgic, archetypical objects. These iconic forms and their retrofuturistic aesthetic: a typewriter, a compass, an old television set with knobs - were deliberately designed to provoke a sense of familiarity with visitors, and convey a sense of traveling into the future without losing our essential humanity.

Purpose Compass:

Embracing human strengths and setting us up to participate in shaping our future:
What if a machine could help you better understand your strengths? What if it could help you succeed in a machine-augmented future? How might we understand and embrace our strengths and transform them into personal development roadmaps to help us shape a machine augmented future? These were some of the questions we addressed with this exhibit: we asked users to describe their current jobs and skill set, and then took them through a game-like interface navigating a future where their skills may become automated and taken over by AI. Afterward, the user is given a printed receipt of what their future career path would look like.

Creativity Mixer:

Unlocking creative expression through accessible tools of creation

What if you could describe your personality, and 'mix' a visual identity that expresses you?How might we unlock creativity through means of expression closer to peoples creative comfort zones to reinforce their creative mindset? What if you could describe your personality, and 'mix' a visual identity that expresses you? Created in collaboration with Vienna-based Creative AI, this machine seeks to provide inspiration toward creating your own personal brand. Based on different brand archetypes, this turntable has different sliders: from Playful to Serious, from Fitting in to Standing out, and other controls - each parameter brings you closer to a certain archetype, and generates a new aesthetic and branding document, resulting from your choices.

Empathy Writer:

Embracing personal and cultural nuances to enrich our interactions
What if you could find just the right words to express your feelings? And nothing got lost in translation?

How might we enrich our conversations by embracing the cultural nuances and personal belief systems of all participants? Placing the user in a situation where they're in a long-distance relationship, this typewriter offers to write a love letter for them, based on their emotional description of themselves and the person they're writing to. People can select two personality attributes to describe themselves, and two for their letter recipient - choosing from 36 emotion tiles. The typewriter displays a preview of the first paragraph, and users can take home a print out of their love letter.

Belief Checkout:

Shaping intelligent systems by embedding our beliefs

What if tomorrow's supermarkets considered your values and ethics when automatically buying products for you?
How might we embed our vision, values and beliefs into AI systems to confidently delegate tasks, enabling AI to negotiate on our behalf? What if tomorrow's supermarkets could embrace your ethical standards when automatically buying products for you? Users can enter the Belief Checkout and select the values they subscribe to, and their supermarket grocery list would be populated with items that are aligned with their belief systems.

Expertise TV:

Enabling human actions through access to expert knowledge

What if a machine could identify gaps within an organization's knowledge and help you figure out how to fill them?
What if a machine could surface gaps within an organisation's knowledge, and prompt you to connect you with people to answer them? How might we leverage the scale of information access and curating power of AI to help us make more actionable decisions? Set in a speculative organization called Pet Drones, the AI helps people identify blind spots in product development, that can be turned into projects by finding the right people. The user gets a printed receipt of a potential project, which they use to find like-minded people with the same interests.