Sometimes it's hard to come up with a reason why you don't fell all that comfortable around a certain person in your social group, and now there's an app that gives you the reason as to why.
Pplkpr (pronounced people keeper), uses one of the many wearable wristbands that are commercially available on the market to measure your physiological reaction to people which lets you decide whether or not you want to keep those people in your social group, with hard evidence to back it up.
It's described by its creators, digital artists Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald, as an "app that tracks, analyzes, and auto-manages your relationships...[it] monitors your physical and emotional response to the people around you, and optimizes your social life accordingly".
Speaking to Dazed Digital, the pair stated that they came up with it partially as an experiment, but are treating it very seriously, releasing an app for download on iTunes. They said they noticed the trend "toward wearables and quantified life and we wondered: when does it go too far?". McCarthy added that people "want to think we’re more than bots. Yet we’re constantly complaining about emails in our inbox, too many social notifications, and FOMO. The idea of an algorithm tracking and managing your social life feels creepy, but what if it actually works? What if it actually improves your relationships and emotional life?"
pplkpr from Lauren McCarthy on Vimeo.
The app contains the feedback from your smartphone on your reactions to the people that you meet throughout the day, and can then let you make the decision to block them in real life if you don't like them, or maybe spend more time with them if they're in your good books.
They have also tested it on a group of students at Carnegie Mellon University, who seem to have reacted positively to it, noting that it's more concrete and scientific than simply saying that someone makes you uncomfortable. McCarthy notes that is part of the point, but it's also a larger question about how technology is influencing our lives: "we are trying to find this place in the middle where we can acknowledge the reality that no technology is black or white / good or bad".
Via Dazed Digital