Social Experiments and Prototype Development

Using Cultural Probes

With our defined goal of creating empathy towards internationals by raising awareness of loneliness in a foreign surrounding, we returned to the public to investigate what loneliness, or to be more exact, social isolation, means to others. For this we decided to use a light version of Cultural Probes, a research method that we had just recently looked into during the methods module. We distributed cards throughout the ZHdK with a question on the front side, asking various people to answer by drawing or writing of their experiences and opinions. For the Cultural Probe we wanted to ask an open question that allowed our target people to answer as freely as possible, hoping that this will lead to a more diverse collection of results.


Through the Cultural Probes we gather over 30 different impressions in a short amount of time. These results varied and gave a good insight to the understanding of social isolation. After evaluating all cards, we selected a handful that we then organised into four different groups. 
  1. the individual all by itself → one individual is illustrated alone within darkness; the vast amount of the colour black really gave a feeling of isolation and loneliness.
  2. highlighting the emotional feelings caused by isolation → feeling empty inside and hiding behind a mask was mentioned many times in our findings
  3. depiction of a language barrier causing isolation → people not understand others often lead to isolation
  4.  the individual lost within a group of people → while networks exists in the surrounding, the individual feel disconnected and lost



One quote from the cards caught our attention the most. It was a description of social isolation, how it occurs and the opinion that there were two forms of social isolations - a positive and a negative.
"Social isolation can evoke both positive and negative sides. Either you choose to be isolated or you are forced to be."
This comment pretty much summarised our findings throughout our whole research and provoked us to try some different experiments.

Social Experiment

Simultaneously, while Randy and Dominik continues evaluating the Cultural Probes, Ju and I set ourselves up in the main entrance hall to perform a small social experiment. We wanted to see whether it was possible to create a feeling of isolation with a minim amount of inputs and whether forcing people into such a situation could strengthen this sensation. With some yellow tape we drew a box on the floor and asked random people to stand inside it for three to five minutes. While these people participated in our experiment, we made sure we disappeared from their line of sight so that they had no connection to anyone at all.




Interestingly enough, we were able to observe exactly what the above comment from our culture probes described: some of our questioned testers described a positive sensation while standing in the box. These people felt it was a rather refreshing experience, being able to reflect upon themselves as they took a break from their busy routine. These observation were mainly shared by locals who clearly felt comfortable in their surroundings and of themselves.
Negative experiences were also reported - keywords such as invisible, isolated and lonely were mentioned by those who felt this way during those few minutes. These people, compared to those who felt positive towards our experiment, interestingly enough were people who did not feel comfortable with the Swiss language.

We concluded that locals or people who felt more comfortable in the surrounding society need a bigger influence / inputs so that they could experience some sort of negative loneliness. While for internationals or people who were more insecure not many influences are needed to make them feel isolated.

We also realised that negative effects could not occur for locals as the duration of this exposure of isolation was known - many mentioned that had they not known how long they had to stay in place they would have felt more uncomfortable over time.

Experience Prototyping

After our Cultural Probes and especially after collecting our observations of the social experiment we asked ourselves - how can we create an experience for locals so that they can empathise with the internationals? 
We realised that locals needed more external influences due to the fact that they felt confident and comfortable as themselves in the surrounding society. So was there a possibility of creating more intensive external influences? How can we create a foreign surrounding which forced locals to lose their confidence and securities?
For our prototyping presentation we thought of doing a different type of presentation - one that should force such a sense isolation upon the locals. We wanted to create the negative form of social isolation by forcing people into these foreign surroundings.