Context
Consuming content on the internet these days amplifies confirmation bias, where only information and opinions that conform to one’s beliefs are presented, thanks to the personalisation algorithms. Internet users might get isolated in a filter bubble without exposure to differing viewpoints and opposing perspectives. This affects their world view, and in turn, affects their decisions and actions.
How might we break this filter bubble to expose users to diverse perspectives and let people come across ideas through serendipity?
Our team envisioned a future in which the users can experience the internet, just as its earliest vision – non-personalised, neutral and impartial. We created Airo.
What’s Airo?
Airo is a personal, yet not personalised radio. Airo empowers individuals to become aware of the filter bubble and take control over it by promoting exposure to diverse perspectives. It is a physical computing system that challenges the filter bubble phenomenon and presents an alternate way of experiencing social media.
Airo reads out tweets to you.
The user can choose between different categories of tweets, such as news, music and technology.
Expanding the fan increases the geographical range of the tweets. The fan is a metaphor for ‘widening the horizon’.
How was Airo made?
Created with Arduino and Processing, Airo connects to Twitter’s API. It fetches real-time tweets and transfers them into audio through text-to-speech technology. The fan connects to Arduino through an encoder. Expanding it fetches tweets from a larger radius. The potentiometer-embedded knob allows you to choose different categories, by fetching tweets with different hashtags, namely news, music, and technology. It also has a vertical volume controller at the base.
Press
Yanko Design | Core77 | Tabi Labo
This project was done as part of the one-week Physical Computing course at CIID, along with my teammates Surojit Dey, Varenya Raj and Yuxi Liu. The design brief was to design and implement interactive objects which are open and connected, whose design and behaviour can be used to listen, playback and change variables and behaviours associated to a novel radio.
