Author: James Chou

 
Capsule, a digitized reflective tool, stems from my research of social media influencers and their power to change people’s behavior. While social media influencers have been found effective in influencing people’s decisions, they are not as effective as the people around you that you trust. Think about it, would you be more willing to buy a product if your best friend recommended you or a social media influencer who is just sharing the product because they are being paid to do so. From this reasoning, I began to think about the power of my social influencers and what are some of the ways I think about them.

Reflecting about the influencers in our life is an important exercise for our mind because reflection is a way for people to grow and learn from the past. Reflection is critical because it helps better understand and develop our skills and effectiveness as human beings to learn from our past rather than just carrying on with our daily lives. More importantly, self-reflection is a way to learn more about who we are and why we do certain things.

Looking through our documented memories through our phone is an effective way to reflect as visual imagery is much more powerful than writing. However, in our busy daily life, we do not have the time to sit down and reflect through photos and videos. This process becomes very passive and unappealing. Thus I wanted to create Capsule.

Through this project, I discovered that our photos and videos recorded in our phones are so much more meaningful than we might have thought. They are the specific moments and people we want to remember in our lives, but often they are just sitting in our phones. Through Capsule, it can give those recorded memories a different purpose rather than just a form of documentation. Capsule helps you engage with those photos and videos while helping you reflect the importance of them.