Our concept is Spirit, an artificially-intelligent personal assistant – like Apple’s Siri – designed to augment our social bonds, but using the technologies of tomorrow.

We envisage a world where we’ll give Spirit access to every part of our lives: who we speak, what we read, and watch; even, though tiny sensors in our body, what we eat, and drink, and how we respond physically, emotionally, and psychologically to people, places, things.

Spirit’s algorithm then analyses that data to build a fine-grained profile of us, and discern who, and what, keeps us socially active, mentally stimulated, and physically healthy. Spirit then uses that data to improve our conversations, and help us meet potential friends, students or co-workers it predicts would be good for us.

Spirit is a provocation on the increasingly important, intimate and intrusive role technologies play in our lives. Today’s emerging technologies are tomorrow’s design tools. As our lives, and societies are shaped by them, placing human-centredness at the heart of services like Spirit will become hugely significant.

For the visual interface see also: http://waltzbinaire.com/work/talktome/