The results of an experiment conducted by Frederic Gmeiner, a faculty member from the College of Architecture, Art and Design (CAAD) at American University of Sharjah (AUS), are on display at the exhibition Empathic Futures in Berlin, held November 16, 2017 to February 28, 2018.

Empathic Futures–Exploring the Future of Human–Machine Relationships is a research collaboration between the design company FELD, a studio for digital crafts, and Volkswagen Group Future Center Europe that explores the future of human–machine relationships by looking at the way humans communicate with and build trust in machines. 

At the core of the exhibition stands an app experiment in which 500 participants from across Europe communicated in a chat conversation for five days with their personal mobility-related Empathic Intelligence (EI) on their smartphones, training it and building a relationship through text conversation. The exhibition shows examples from the conversations between the participants and their EI. The interactive elements of the exhibition allow the visitors to explore the entire archive, which can also be visited at www.empathicfutures.com. 

The goal of the interactive exhibition is to provide an inspiring platform for future-oriented and challenging questions, debates and ideas. 

Gmeiner, Assistant Professor of Art and Design at AUS, co-founded FELD in 2011 and the studio practice is focused on the design and development of innovative digital media products, services and spatial installations. The project on display started with concepts that Gmeiner and his team at FELD developed for finding new methods for innovation at Volkswagen. The challenge included coming up with ideas about how trust can be developed between complex autonomous future systems and their potential users. Out of this, the team developed the Empathic Futures experiment.

As Gmeiner states:

“Design is a great tool to stimulate and inspire the way people imagine and shape the future and to explore new forms of collaborative dialogues.”

In addition to the findings from the Empathic Futures experiment, several interactive exhibits designed and developed by FELD are also included in the exhibition, which is being held at the Volkswagen Group Forum in Berlin.

The experiment and exhibition will be continued and conducted next year in other parts of the world.