Design, Strategy, & Practice Week 6: I Want to Fit In

For this week I decided to focus on the issue of acculturative stress, a term that refers to the psychological difficulties experienced by migrants in trying to adapt to a different place and culture. Having migrated to the US when I was eighteen, I’ve experienced first-hand the psychological toll of having to live in a different country where I knew nobody and had many cultural gaps to overcome. In an era when the perceived inability to assimilate is being constantly weaponized by xenophobes to deny people mobility, I wanted to create a piece that would enable people to reflect on all the invisible mental pressures migrants quietly face when attempting to participate in a new culture.

Concept

“I Want to Fit in” will be a satirical location-based service that will guide the user through making the necessary modifications to their personality to more closely match the average personality of the people in their area, so that they can more effectively mingle with the local population.

After analyzing the user’s personality based on their social media posts, the service will identify the aspects of the user’s personality that deviate the most from the average personality of people in the area, and provide specific instructions for how the user can transform their behavior to better match the local norm. For example, the user might be instructed to become more neurotic and less authority-challenging, and be recommended specific tasks that would help them achieve that.

At the end of the experience, the user will be invited to learn more about psychometric analysis and understand what their digital footprint can reveal about them. Psychometric analysis based on social media activity has gained a lot of notoriety lately for the way it was employed by the marketing company Cambridge Analytica to manipulate voter behavior during the Brexit and Trump campaigns.