How will your next online purchase decision impact your future and that of the planet? This question forms the basis of Dissuasion Engine. The project seeks to engage the broader public with the overwhelming wicked problem of overconsumption, the role that new AI-based technologies play in accelerating it and the unintended costs or what economists call ‘externalities’ that such overconsumption generates for the planet. Drawing on the project team’s transdisciplinary expertise in digital media, communications design, economics, computer science and theater, the project will prototype a new kind of web-based, interactive consumption experience — one that will enable its users to critically reflect on the human-environmental externalities involved in their/our consumption decisions. Dissuasion Engine aims to bring to the surface how hidden technologies shape our decisions of what and how much to consume in the first place.

15-17 October, 2021
Driving the Human, radialsystem, Berlin, Germany, and online
by Chris Salter, Erik Adigard and Alexandre Quessy
https://drivingthehuman.com/prototype/dissuasion-engine/