Student Notable

Speculative Design Award

Core77 Design Awards 2024

Editor's Choice Core77 editors selected this project as an outstanding example of great design in 2024 See our writeup here

Exit the Rat Race

In an attempt to break free from consumerism, Exit the Rat Race uses discursive design to question the habits of irrational spending in a modern life. By telling stories of capitalism gone wrong, can we reflect on our understanding of how design is used to make us open up our wallets, prompting a call for change in ourselves?

Exit the Rat Race comes to life as 8 projects paired with written content, each about a different topic surrounding money and spending at exit-the-race.com. Renderings and a promotional video were then disseminated through a Reddit advertisement campaign through Black Friday week of 2023. The Ohio State University's Industrial Design program was partnered with and funded by Huntington Bank for this senior capstone project. Using $120 to reach over 120,000 devices in an endeavor to use discursive design as a catalyst for educational awareness.

Prototyping the Design Research Booklet

Collecting Research Results

Money Machine What are children? Susceptible, young, impressionable, vulnerable, little juice boxes of money.
Consumerism views the youth as beginner consumers and manipulating them to be - reap great rewards. The Money Machine is an ATM with a section for adults and a section for children, with its user interface guided by a cartoon character who makes it easy to use. Revealing to us a dystopic future of consumerism without few limits.

Data Mining Data Mining calls attention to the invisible data industry that profits on our use of the internet. The conversation of ethics and data becomes blurry when you realize the data you contribute is not just working against you. Your data is used against people who are like you too. Your data is affecting others, and their relationship with consumerism. Even if you never fulfill a purchase from an advertisement you've seen, there is someone else who has - because of your data. Did you agree to that?

Diy iPhone There are forgotten stakeholders involved in the creation of your phone. The issue becomes clear when we realize that the phone is bought once, but advertisements are riddled throughout its user experience, always asking for more. The Diy iPhone shows us a breakdown of the raw resources used to make our phones. It's quite grim to realize that so much pain and suffering goes into harvesting the resources to create your phone - which ends up becoming a tool to then harvest you.

The Leaderboard A dating app of the future brings finances into the equation of partner selection. Pointing out how our spending is sometimes driven by a desire for status and image. Does keeping our financial lives in the dark also keep us in the Rat Race? If our finances were on public display would we consume differently? Not focusing on our outward appearance, and trying to fake it till we make it, but focusing on rational spending. What would life look like if we were transparent about our finances?

Cumbersome Credit Card Has spending become too easy? Imagine a foot-long credit card, the Cumbersome Credit Card. It is given to people in credit card debt, bringing shame and inconvenience to the physical check-out process. This credit card has two ends of payment, one end works, and the other does not. With the ends being identical, you can't tell one side from the other. Giving you a 50/50 chance of holding up the Starbucks line and receiving the news that "your payment has been declined".

The Cost of Living A mechanical hospital ventilator requires $1.05 per 1 second of operation. The Cost of Living uses real life figures of expense, showing us the unreasonable cost of health care in the United States. Would you be able to keep up with the coin slide - to provide the person attached to this lifeline with oxygen? The Cost of Living shows us how America has not yet been able to justify the cost of life for everyone.

Retirement Rations Is retirement our reward? Retirement Rations are a tangible visualization of the end-game of financial life. Partitioned into years, months, and weeks - Retirement Rations are a privilege. They will either grow or shrink depending on your how well you used your early years. Be good, work hard, and your government will take care of you with your share of rations. This is what modern life has to reward its participants of the Rat Race.

50% Off 50% Off is a novelty desk toy that is essentially a miniature guillotine you use to cut your money. It speaks to the impulsive spending we sometimes do, because spending makes us feel good. There are business and design strategies that prey on the emotional spending habits that are firm within human psychology. So next time you browse online shopping for the sake of it, consider a contribution to the money guillotine. In the end, there may be no difference in how it makes you feel.

Advertisement Metrics and Comments Each page of the website has a comment section for feedback and reactions.

Defining the Brief

Exit the Rat Race is an Industrial Design senior capstone project that was given the open-ended prompt of re-imagining day-to-day banking in the 21st century. Through research, feedback, and design conjecture it became necessary for the brief to be reconstructed and tailored to fit the problematic uncovered through design research. The updated brief becomes - to use discursive design as a means of communicating less-than-desirable future scenarios of consumerism and capitalism gone wrong. Through exaggerated design fiction, Exit the Rat Race aims to educate and ask questions about the dark truths of our relationship with spending and money.

Design Research

To gain inspiration for and better understand the landscape of the prompt, secondary research was done on a range of topics relating to banking. This consisted of reading and reviewing online articles which can be found on The Ohio State's Gazzete. Design conjectures were then created as a means of early prototyping, or investigating the value of initial thoughts on design solutions. The Leaderboard was one of these conjectures, which helped to uncover the idea of our spending behaviors being influenced by subconscious thought. In the case of The Leaderboard it offers the idea that we sometimes spend to please others, and that possibly if our finances were transparent - we might spend less. Common phrases such as Keeping up with the Jetsons, Fake it till you make it, Lifestyle inflation, The Pursuit of Happiness, and The Rat Race come to mind as terms for which we have named this phenomenon; giving a name to the project - Exit the Rat Race.

The Design Research Booklet created was also a key component to identifying and supporting the found problematic. The booklet was disseminated among 8 participants sampled conveniently, paired with an online survey with 35 responses. The results of the survey were not found to be helpful. The Design Research Booklet contained Co-Design research methods from Carnival Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design. Methods used included daily logs, conceptual mapping, experience mapping, and a journal. The design research phase concludes by discovering:

Primary Research

Participants underestimated discretionary expenses by 380% in 1 week.

Participants believe they are in an economic recession.

Participants intend to increase their spending through e-commerce and social media.

Participants experienced little buyer's remorse when spending on discretionary expenses.

Secondary Research

Prices are increasing in the United States at a rate greater than the income is increasing.

Process

Autodesk Fusion 360 was used to create the 3D models necessary for each artifact. They were then brought into Keyshot 11 to render the materials, environment, and animations. To create the written components for the digital renderings Adobe Illustrator was used, and Midjourney AI for The Leaderboard's profile pictures. After the images were rendered Adobe Lightroom Classic was used to touch up the gradient banding caused by the strong dark shadows and Adobe Premier Pro was used to compile footage into the video. The footage was captured through an iPod Nano (5th generation), and the found footage from YouTube was also captured through the iPod to maintain video consistency. More details about the footage used in the video can be found on the website.

Visual Language

Dramatic lighting and a dark setting were chosen as the environment's aesthetic to communicate a serious mood and tone. Even though the project is fictional, the message of Exit the Rat Race is weighty and means to surface real-life pressing matters. The artifacts themselves were mostly rendered in slightly textured white clay with the significant elements of each project rendered out with color. The intention is for each object to be 90% white clay and 10% colored, to convey the metaphor of 90% becoming or on the way and 10% reality or here already. The visual language is significant to the story being told as the viewers should feel a sense of urgency in that these futures may be just around the corner.

Advertisement Campaign

Ad 1. Just Images: 5 hero shots of different Exit the Rat Race artifacts were paired with the question it posed (ie: 50% Off, How does spending make us feel?). This resulted in a very high CTR (click-through rate) compared to the following Advertisements. The esoteric question paired with the digital rendering could have left the viewer confused but intrigued resulting in many clicks to find out more.

Ad 2. The Full Video: In this advertisement, the video was promoted and a target audience was selected to test the value of targeting a community. This resulted in significantly higher impressions and clicks than the first advertisement.

Ad 3,4 Half Videos: The video was split into two parts. The first being when Charlie Chapman spoke (0:00 - 1:02) and the second was when Exit the Rat Race was explained (1:03 - 2:09). The reason for doing this was to better understand if one half of the video resonated more with my audience than the other half. The results were disastrous as engagement was low, with only 20 combined clicks and roughly 6,000 impressions.

Ad 5 The Full Video + Money: After completing the previous 4 advertisements and understanding that the 4th had the most success, $100 was funded into this one advertisement. Keep in mind that only $120 was spent on all of the advertisements combined, but Reddit credited the account with $200 as a promotional offer. The result of the 5th advertisement was astonishing, with the CPC (cost per click) line being far beneath the clicks and impressions metrics for the first time. The success of the advertisement may be attributed to high user engagement, as when an advertisement does well the algorithm rewards it by continuing to show it more often. The timing of advertisement 5 can not be ignored as it also may have been a key factor of success, for it was displayed during Black Friday and Thanksgiving weekend when many people are likely to be off of work and at home with family.

Ad 6 The Full Video - Targeted Audience: The final advertisement was the same as advertisement 5 except the target audience mistakenly was not selected. This resulted in poor metrics, but a learning experience in how crucial it is for an advertisement campaign to have a target audience in mind.