The Middle Experience: Facilitating empathy through enmeshed stories about common emotions
Motivation
Following the general election, I still felt shaken by the animosity I had seen and continued to see from both political parties. I continued to wonder how we could stop treating those around us as 'other' and instead really empathize with what people who were different from us were going through.
Goal
Make a creative project that leveraged computing and enveloped the theme 'know new now knew' as and "say" something of significance. This involved a lot of iteration, prototyping, presentation and both giving and responding to critique.
Project
Inspired by The Machine to be Another, and Myeroff's Number our Days - I wondered if we could use technology as a mediator to facilitate experiences that enmeshed two individual's stories playing upon the same emotion. In doing so, these experiences would allow us to treat others better because we now know them in a new way - or empathize.
Initial Installation Plan
We often think empathy comes from going through the same experience, but that is not always the case. We can live through the same experience but feel different emotions and make different decisions. Thus, in order to empathize with someone it may be more helpful to think through your own experiences that have resulted in the emotion the other is feeling, and use that as a way of seeking common ground, rather than focusing on the ways we may react differently to the same situations.
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My initial installation plan was centered around this idea. To start, a participant would select on a computer an emotion that they wanted to use to connect to someone else, the performer, and think through an experience they have had that involved that emotion. Then they would input the key objects and actor's from their experience into the system (1). The system would then retrieve the performer's story about that emotion, and redact its key objects and actors and replace them with the participant's input. This results in the "middle experience" an enmeshing of the performers shell story with objects and actors from the participant. For example, if the story was about the emotion fear, and the performers story involved spiders, all references to spiders would be replaced with an object that the participant was afraid of - maybe birds (2). Next, the participant would immerse themselves into this "middle experience" through entering the simulation room. They would visit different stations with objects from the story, and upon walking by them the corresponding snippet of the performer's story will play in the participant's headphones (4). Once finished, the participant would be given the performer's original story, which they can now relate to through thinking of what it feels like to be afraid (in this example), regardless of one's triggers (5).
Early Decisions
Team Formation
Project Planning
To start, I proposed my idea to the class and assembled a team who was passionate about carrying it out, and had the necessary skills to do so. First, Jacob came on board because he had a similar project idea and had a lot of web developement experience that we needed to take in form input and craft the enmeshed narrative. Next, Ishita joined us because of her passion for empathy and connections to psychologists we could ask for advice on the cognitive and emotional aspects of our project. Lastly, Mary became one of our team members because of her experience and connections to theater that could help us craft impactful stories.
In planning our project, we realized that the first step would be to choose which emotions we would build off of , collect stories that championed them, and defined which objects and actors in a story were important. We decided it would be best to pick only one easy emotion to prototype for class demo day, and then use the process we architected in completing that story as a template for the rest. After a lot of conversation, we decided to go with embarrassment as our first emotion - since it was light, easy to relate to and there was a wealth of examples of inducing it in familiar media. We also did some research surrounding techniques to empathize and came upon emotional priming - the act of having an individual try to relive an experience in order to 'prime' them to feel that emotion more deeply.
Consulting the Experts
Pyschology
Theater
To choose the rest of the emotions for our installation, we decided to consult with a psychologist Ishita knew. She recommended that we think from a marketing perspective and use emotions that they commonly employ, like - fear, guilt, trust, value, competition, instant gratification, leadership and trend setting. We soon realized that we could also use the inverse of any of these feelings and that the latter half of what our consultant proposed were more like secondary emotions, and so decided to leave them out of our project. Additionally, thinking about the fact that the audience for our project would be the general public, we realized that to have high impact we would need to play upon relatable emotions. Circling back to the psychologist, she informed us that the most common positive emotion she saw in her work was accomplishment, and the most negative was betrayal. These, along with embarrassment, fit well into our initial marketing list, and resonated with our emotional priming research which suggested that negative and strong emotions are the easiest for people to remember and call upon.
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We also consulted individuals from theater through Mary, to get a better handle on how to best present our stories purely in narrative form. For we had realized that doing storytelling only using audio meant we were going to need a lot of guidance on what makes for a good story. In the end, her contacts told us that it would be better to first get the stories for the 3 emotions we were aiming for, then ask for advice on how to showcase those specific stories well.
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Capturing Embarassing Stories
We started our search by looking through Radiothon's 'Call in Your Embarrassing Stories' collection. Unfortunately these clips were not substantial enough to build out a full immersive experience. So instead, I proposed that I poll a class I was teaching for embarrassing stories, and my team agreed. I interviewed 18 different students who shared their most embarrassing story with me. Unfortunately, through this I realized that many stories did not have vague components that could be easily switched out and replaced. However, I was pleased to find that students were very articulate in explaining why the experience was particularly embarrassing for them, and often had specific phrases that took me back to similar embarrassing experiences of my own. Stories like these that were highly relatable (and often cringe-y), as well as appropriate for many ages and powerful were the criteria we used to pick the 3 top stories. We then had the participants who told them write them down, and from those picked the story with the most detailed content to move forward with for our project. Lastly, Mary evaluated the story for impact points and recorded herself narrating it.
Installation Plan 2.0
We revisited and revised the initial installation plan (changes denoted by * below)- adding emotional priming elements and scoping the immersive aspects. Now, a participant would not only select an emotion they wished to connect on, but they would also fill out a survey that asked them additional questions about their own experience, along with questions about key actors and objects in their story. We hoped that by asking additional question about their experience it would allow for emotional priming of that feeling to take place (1). The participant would then go into a booth with a projector and headphones and listen to the performer's story (3). The projector would follow along the story narration with images that describe the story, but then display images that corresponded to the participant's actors and objects, when the story came upon the performers key objects and actors (2: almost like in a madlib fashion). Afterwards, the participant would leave with a paper copy of the performer's original story without any redaction or replacement (4). Further details can be found here.
Initial Technical System
To implement this, our technical plan consisted of 2 computers. One would be responsible for presenting the survey to the participant, and then pass the results (emotion name and key actors and objects) to the other computer. This other computer would run a program that uses a back end service to fetch images that matched the description of the key actors and objects, and insert them into pre-arranged parts of the story. However, for our demo day the second computer only displayed these passed parameters to a team member - who manually picked out matching images. The computers talked using web-sockets, and all interfaces and processing were constructed with html, css and javascript.
Class Demo Day
Test Run
Feedback
A few days before we presented our project to our class, we made sure to do a test run with some of our peers. In doing so we were able to catch and rectify a few kinks in our installation like: computer going to sleep after inactivity, more clear directions at each point of the simulation, and recommendations for deeper priming - using trigger words to elicit emotions even more. Then on demo day, after some initial explanation and presentation, we received a lot of feedback from our class on multiple parts of our system.
Firstly, we were told that our images were not visceral enough - and thus did not invoke the cringe-y embarrassing feelings we were hoping for. We had tried to get a sequence of a little girl barfing (part of the embarrassing story) from screenshots of famous TV shows, but we were not able to do this well. In order to get better ones, our peers suggested we either draw or photograph our own. Additionally, the flow of our installation was critiqued. Our professor said that our images needed to fade faster, and there needed to be more of them to better immerse a participant into the story. Our peers also mentioned that picking one image for the participant and flashing it at different points in the story was confusing, and possibly there would not be a great way to weave any unrelated image of the participant into the performer's story - so they suggested we work on creating bookends with participant images instead. In the same way, they also mentioned that we needed to have a more impactful exit because our current simulation did not have any points that hit home. Furthermore, our professor told us we needed to think more through the power of suggestion, especially when it came to embarrassment. For instance, instead of showing a kid barfing - showing a kid gagging and about to barf would allow the participant to project onto the simulation their own feelings and experiences. Lastly, we were told that our survey was too long, and it would be better to make some of the questions rhetorical and move them to our priming stage.
Addressing Feedback
Creating Impact through Presentation
Creating Impact through
Affective Memory
Thinking through our feedback, we realized that we were going to need on overhaul on our presentation. Firstly, in order to have visceral images - we decided to take our own since I had had many years of experience with photography, but none of our members had strong drawing skills. To do this I recruited the person who submitted the embarrassing story to play the role of the teacher, and asked the mother of a 6 year old who lived in our dorm if she could help us and play the role of the child. We had a lot of fun scoping out good venues for our project, and creating fake barf with a mashed up plumb. In the end we used our professor's advice on using the power of suggestion for a lot of the shots of the project.
We also knew we would have to restructure our simulation in order to have a better flow and a more impactful exit. After a lot of brainstorming we realized that we could show images that pertained to the story during its telling, but then at the end interweave images of the performer's story and an image from the participant in a collage, while speaking about how we all have embarrassing experiences. We believed this would both help with the flow of the story and provide a powerful bookend that could point to our larger goals of empathy. You can read our intro and exit script for this here.
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Additionally, we realized that we were not doing enough with our emotional priming techniques, so we did more research to see what methods existed to help bring people back to their past experiences. In doing so, we came upon affective memory - a method acting technique where actors call upon their own experience to feel and project a similar emotion when acting. We realized that we could adapt aspects of this technique to help our participants do the same. So we shortened the survey to just be about choosing an emotion and a small blurb about the experience, and added a larger emotional priming segment at the beginning of the simulation. During this, our prerecorded audio asked participants to relax and close their eyes and think through the context of their experience. Then they were asked many questions about the sensual aspects of the experience (touch, taste, smell, etc), which led into asking questions about emotional aspects. Additionally, we read a study that said that people could calm themselves emotionally through choosing to ruminate on the physical aspects of a scenario instead of the emotional ones, but since we wanted the opposite to take place we made to sure to spend more time asking questions about emotions rather than the physical context. You can read an example of our emotional priming script for embarrassment here.
Capturing Remaining Stories & Booth Prototyping
For our last two emotions - accomplishment and betrayl, we realized that the best person to tell a story is the one who lived it. One of our member's had two good stories in these realms, a background of actor training, and experience with using audio equipment on campus. Thus, we decided that she should be one the to capture and record our stories for these.
We also worked to prototype the booth for our simulation. We know that we wanted our booth to be almost fully enclosed to help participants be immersed in the story, and that we could use some of the whiteboards in our classroom to
work as makeshift walls if we had enough fabric to cover them and make a roof. But even with these items in place, we still had many components that needed to be interconnected that would require some planning on our part - some of which would be inside the booth (like the projector, headphones, 1 laptop) and others on the outside. In the end we settled on implementing the diagram on the right.
Final Technical System
Our final technical plan still consisted of 2 computers. One would be responsible for presenting the survey to the participant, and then pass the results (emotion and snapshot of their experience) to the other computer. This other would be run by a member of our team, who would manually pick an appropriate image for the participant story and pass it to the first computer. We decided on this 'Wizard of Oz' approach rather than using a back end service so that we could spend more time crafting the experiential components of our project rather than the programmatic ones. This first computer would then play the priming sequence, story and ending sequence with the participant performer collage. The computers talked using web-sockets, and all interfaces and processing were constructed with html, css and javascript. All necessary files were hosted locally on the first computer. To the left you can see two different diagrams that represent the same sequence.
Installation Plan 3.0
With all of our changes (denoted by *) our installation was now a little different than our earlier plan. Participants would first fill out a survey that asked them which emotion they wanted to experience, and write a small blurb on their experience (1). Then, they would continue into the booth and go through emotional priming with affective memory techniques* by listening to our prerecorded audio (2A). During this time, one of our members would receive their blurb of their experience, find a related photo and send it to our program for use in the collage (2B). Next the participant would listen to the audio of the performer's story, with some accompanying images. At the end of the presentation a collage* would show that had both images from the performer's story, and the one picked out by a team member for the participant (3). The participant would then fill out a small poll about their experience* and leave with a copy of the original performer's story (4).
1: SELECTION
2A: PRIMING*
2B: CONSTRUCTION
3: THE SIMULATION*
4: ACHIEVEMENT*
Testing our Revised Installation
Feedback
Creating Impact through
Raw Presentation
A week out from ICAT day, we had the opportunity to get additional feedback on our recently revised system. We had 2 different peers from our class try it out, along with a visiting professor. The students told us that we needed better pacing with the affective memory questions to let them really sink in, and more directions to help eliminate confusion around things like where the booth entrance was, and why there were pauses between parts of the experience. The professor spoke to us more on the experiential aspects of our simulation - particularly that it was hard to relate to a cleanly presented story, and that more genuine conversation with raw elements would do a better job of promoting empathy.
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Returning to brainstorming again, we decided to adapt our accomplishment and betrayal stories to a more raw conversational style. To do so I interviewed the team member whose experiences made up these stories, videotaped her responses, and stitched the pieces together. Doing so allowed us to capture the more organic back and forth nature of a conversation, and let participants see our teammate's emotions via captured facial reactions.
