The ethical implication we decided to focus on was – the progress bar could be addicting. As humans, when we check something off of our checklist and see our progress go up, we feel very good – our brain releases dopamine. And once we get a taste of that feeling, we tend to crave it more. Goal creation and progress tracking are a significant part of our solution. While our intention is to allow users to keep track of their progress and be more accountable as they work towards their personal goals in the context of maintaining existing friendships or creating new ones, there could be a situation where users try to gamify working on social relations – they don’t really put effort into maintaining existing friendships or creating new ones anymore and just check off their goals since seeing the progress bar go up is just so addicting. With this design fiction project, our goal is to make our audience more aware of the fact that while seeing the progress bar go up is a great feeling, if you lie to yourself and just check off tasks to see the progress bar go up, the happiness will soon fade away and you will begin to feel discontent since you did not genuinely work towards your goal. True and lasting happiness comes from pushing yourself to complete your goal to become a better version of yourself. The way we decided to address this in our app is by emphasizing meaningful interactions – a private space for reflection (journaling) so you can be as honest to yourself as possible as well as thoughtful and intentional prompts to help facilitate more meaningful interactions.
We leave our readers with a question at the end of our design fiction story instead of giving them the answer since we believe this allows them to think more critically about the issue.
