Patricia Yu (P), Julia Sanders (C), Sarah Lee (P) / Series of digital campaign posters
Tactics: behavior change, emotional engagement, visual persuasion
OVERVIEW
A future has emerged in which humans have become inseparable with their personified physical objects and treat them as intimate companions. This awakens a group of people’s awareness in trying to combat this addiction. Humanize Us is a society that has the mission to campaign against our machines. They protest for technology to become less humanized as the population begins to lose their independence and unique self-identity.
BACKGROUND
As society heads into a future where technology becomes increasingly more intimate in our lives, people are romantically invested in our technological systems and rely on them for almost every aspect. This is mainly inspired by popular media and people’s general fascination about the future between our relationship with our technology. One example is seen from the movie Her.
Our envisions on the future is founded on our realities as well. Signs of over-reliance and addiction are apparent:
According to a study by Penn State, 77% said that society as a whole relied too much on technology to succeed.
According to Trendhunter, 66% of the population suffers from nomophobia (the fear of having “no mobile”) today.
In our project, we explore how this accrued over-reliance on technology begins to urge people to notice the disastrous future we are headed in and aim to awaken people’s awareness in trying to combat against this addiction. The goal is to make technology dehumanized.
Using our campaigns from the future, we hope to guide people in our present world to question what it means to “humanize” our technology.
CAMPAIGN SERIES
Our campaign digital posters utilize the use of emotional engagement with dramatic imagery, such as the “bleeding” robotic arm and the uncomfortable image of a robotic “woman” surrounded by gazing men. These images contradict each other and evoke thoughts of what is exactly going on in the scene. We hope that by creating these juxtapositional posters — each one with a different reflection of our relationship with technology — it can visually persuade people of the future who are over-reliant on their machines to deeply reflect on their well-being and begin to have more awareness on their reality. Our campaign is meant to allow people to join an organization, Humanize Us, that fights back against the social influences promoting this addiction.
