The culmination of my undergraduate career has led up to this Senior Design Project: an opportunity to engage with a previous or current body of work I’ve created to examine it more deeply. My project, titled Winspire, is originally a Facebook page I created to help more people realize self-actualization. Since it always bothered me that certain friends, family and people around me in general didn’t do much for themselves in their respective career, life, health, relationships and so forth, I wanted to be a voice for the more virtuous things in life. I figured that Facebook could be a good vehicle for influencing people towards making more constructive decisions for themselves since most of us spend our time trapped in that endless newsfeed anyways (seriously – the average FB user scrolls more than 600feet on the platform PER DAY), and so I started producing some media assets and curating a collection of inspirational videos.

                  My only hitch with this approach is that I feel as though the page has become somewhat stereotypical – there’s enough motivational content out there already; what is the differentiating factor between Winspire and Gary Vaynerchuk? Beyond the brand level and going back to why I started the page, I realized that I wanted to take Winspire beyond social media and turn it into something actionable (and perhaps tangible), that not only inspires people to make altruistic choices, but gives them an actionable tool or methodology to do so. It’s not enough to tell people to do it anymore, you need to identify their why and how.

                  To that effect, the principle question I’m asking during this project is, “how can media and technology be used to catalyze favorable behavioral change?” To tackle this question, I’ll be consulting various psychology texts on media and human motivation, as well as practices in the marketing world employed by conscientious organizations looking to accomplish tasks such as reducing the cigarette smoking population or curbing growing obesity rates. I want to touch on a wide collection of self-sabotaging issues people struggle with through different pieces, and create a portfolio of installations or interactive media that get people to think, act and behave differently.