Intravenous Emotion Download – A speculative project on Loneliness by Larissa Berghofer

The topic for this project is loneliness in connection to smartphones and social media. I wanted to explore (im-)possible alternate realities of a life without phones and how personas feel and act upon loneliness through the use of speculative design.

This should be the starting point of opening up a discussion and raising questions to talk about our own relationship with our phones and how this affects our emotions. After the initial research phase and analyzing the replies from surveys and probes, I drifted more towards loneliness in people my age (so the age between 20-29) and how loneliness affects them.

On a personal level, I found it very interesting how many people use social media or phones as a means to distract themselves from being lonely, connecting to people, and keeping relationships alive, even though those “things” were often also the reason they feel lonely in the first place. That is why I wanted to explore this area of tension by commenting on it, rather than trying to solve this, in my eyes, unsolvable problem. The outcome is a set of objects that downloads emotions into your genetically and technologically modified body. Emotions can be bought on cartridges, which hold different versions, updates, and/or upgrades to what you currently have installed. Retailers and advertisers, who work for the companies selling those emotions, try to come with things like emotional parties, free “shots'' and other gimmicks to interest the people in buying the newest, updated emotion.