Brainwashed

The Gogbot Festival is a yearly festival in Enschede with changing topic on new technologies and the societal implications of these technologies. In 2021, the topic was “INFOCALYPSE NOW- Time to Recalibrate Reality” and addresses the rise of deep fakes and disinformation and its influences on society and what we perceive as reality. The question is:

How do we stay together as a society in times when nothing is as it seems?

Who use deepfake media, and is their application always questionable?

Is it possible to reverse the fragmentation of the social debate and our sense of reality, for example by systematically exposing the origins of disinformation campaigns?

My group landed on an interactive installation where the user is confronted with a scenario and has to sort through fake and real news to help the reporters find out what really happened. In the end they see the consequences, if you did well enough or the fake news won.

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Process

This project was done in a group of 9 people and my group decided to focus on fake new and how people decide who to trust when confronted with information overload. To develop the installation, we first focused on the emotions we want to elicit and how the experience should evolve over time.

Then the group was split into smaller groups to work on the different aspects of the installation. I was part of the technical design and programming team. With one other person, I programmed the visualizations and UI in Unity and worked with the rest of the programming team to implement the wiiRemote as the control unit for the user.

Evaluation

To evaluate the installation we created, we combined methods that focus on evaluating while the experience is happening with retrospective methods.

To guide the observational part of the evaluation we used several questions to assess how well the user understood the controls, whether the system was responsive and the facial expressions of the users while experiencing the installation. We considered questions like: “Are the buttons clear to the user?”, “Can they properly select the menus?” for the user focussed evaluation and “Is the sensitivity of the remote smooth?” and “Do the buttons respond to the users input promptly” for the system focussed side.

In addition to these observational methods, we used several methods to capture the experience the user had in retrospect. An AttrackDiff survey focussed on feedback from the user regarding the aspects aesthetics, complexity, message, engagement and innovation of the installation. The survey consists of these five aspects which the user rates through a likert scale. To not only gain more insight into predefined closed questions we also asked them about suggestions, remarks and feedback in general. Another questionnaire focussed more on how the installation was understood by the user. With open questions we asked the participants about what the installation taught them, what they thought the message was, what the most memorable thing about the installation was and if the purpose of the installation, so the deeper meaning of the installation came across.To understand more about the emotions we want to elicit in the user, we chose to use the sketching of UX curves. Hereby we focused on excitement, overstimulation, focus and irritation. To learn about the flow of these certain emotions we want to elicit, we had the users sketch the course of these emotions as curves. To better show these changes of the emotions we combined the individual UX curves of the different emotions in one graph.

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Findings

One big part of the evaluation plan for the installation was to gain more understanding of the experience users have while using the installation and the emotions it elicits. In all of the methods we used, we found that the installation does indeed evoke the emotions we aimed for, namely, overstimulation, irritation and excitement. This can be seen very clearly in the UX curves the participants sketched as well as in the open feedback we got. Especially the fun-factor and the feeling of being overwhelmed were pointed out a lot. In the AttrackDiff survey we learned that the installation is being received as innovative and engaging. This can be corroborated by the sketched excitement curves, as well as the open questionnaire. With the limited number of participants the answer to the aesthetics, complexity and message of the installation is not clear, but it indicates a tendency towards a positive answer. 

Another aspect of the evaluation was to find points of improvement and gain insight into how the installation is used. These two link closely together, because how users interact with the installation is a great reference for what can be changed to further improve the installation. With the results of the evaluation we found that while the user enjoys interacting with the installation, the controls are very confusing to some which hinders an optimal game experience. While the goal of the installation is to illustrate the information overload of the news we are experiencing nowadays, particularly this overstimulation is an issue some participants feel the need to solve immediately. They simply eliminate the videos with the spoken news to tone down the overwhelming feel of the installation. The elimination of the different news sources was quickly understood by most of the users, but the muting and magnification was rarely used without a reminder from the team. It was however pointed out that the news articles, tweets and subtitles are very small and the font size should be increased - even when magnified. Contrary to the elimination the participants were missing a function to interact with the news they labeled as real. These answers and improvements also mean that the goal of the installation, the deeper meaning, was understood by the participants. This can also be seen in the open questionnaire, although some of the participants indicated that they feel the message would be clearer if we did not focus on one topic, but present multiple different topics of news during the installation, to really emphasize the information overload.