Workit Wednesday 002: The Case of the Hacked Smart Pillow

Design Fiction prompted by cards

In this week’s Workit Wednesday I drew a new random assortment of cards from the Design Fiction Work Kit to inform this specimen.

Let’s break down what went through my head this time.

Archetype = Police Report
Object = Pillow
Attribute = Forbidden
Action = Recommend
Tone = Lonely

Okay, so a police report about a pillow. The attribute combined with the report make me think of something illegal. The action conjures up the idea of subliminal messages, especially in a vulnerable state like sleeping … and the tone fits well with sleep.

Your best idea is either your first idea or your 100th idea, you won’t know until you’ve done the work. And seeing as this is a daily exercise in a rapid Design Fiction prototyping, I’m just gonna stick with my first idea.

In this case, I’m imagining a police report documenting an incident where a smart pillow was hacked and used to plant subliminal messages into the victim’s head as they lay sleeping. This causes them to spend their money on stuff the hacker is benefitting from. Some kind of low key social-engineering tactic that I could see becoming commonplace in the future.

Anyway, for today’s report, I fed some of this information into ChatGPT and asked it to write a bunch of incident reports. It took a few takes before I settled on this one. Again, this is a speed run, so It’s all about getting it done, and not making it perfect.

I hope you enjoyed this. Give me a clap if you found this useful or informative.

---