MOM has the ability to monitor the user’s energy consumption in real time and make suggestions based his/her behavior. Although MOM is an fully functional AI system, her intention is very pure: energy optimization.

The project takes a deeper look into the relationship between human and AI systems. MOM can be categorized as an “Artificial General Intelligence” (found this term in Tim Urban’s article The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence)  Therefore we think of her as a system that’s capable of reasoning. On that assumption, we immediately decided to look at the relationship as human to human versus a human to “super smart machine” mindset. If MOM wants you to save energy, will you just simply abide or will you put up a fight?

The final format of this project is a short film. Inspired by the movie “Her” by Spike Jones and “Frank and Robot” by Jake Schreier, we decided to approach the project from both design and narrative directions. In other words, we want to make not only an interesting design project, but also an interesting narrative project. We found that film as a narrative tool are often used only as a vehicle to house and transport ideas of the design project, instead of becoming a part of the structure of that project. We wanted to create something that uses the story to engage the audiences so that they are not just forced to finish a 6 minutes film to understand the project. We wanted to create a story that’s close people’s everyday life while addressing issues that have not taken place yet. We decided that the technology should stay in the background only to support the story.

We ended up with an six and half minutes film that uses 3 different stories to address human relationships with an artificial intelligence. Take a look.
(you can watch in HD if you watch this on the Vimeo website instead of the player. Click the vimeo logo on bottom right to go watch on vimeo)

In collaboration with Ji Won Jun and Xiaochen Yang