Arunachalam Murugesan
Future of scams: A speculative design on how people will adapt to counter the rising scams among them in the near future.
Future of scam is a speculative design project on how scams will evolve in the future and how people will fight against it to not fall for them.The project tries to project the implication of modern scamming in the future society to create an awareness and arguments about current measures. It emphasizes on the fact that scammers exploit the emotions of people to impair their rational decision-making ability. This makes them easy prey for the scammers.
Through the literature review and desk research, I found out that scams have not changed much over the years and the technologies are used to scale up and enable the scamming. These led me to investigate how scammers use psychological tricks and communication techniques to scam people. The role of emotion in social engineering scams was a key finding from my research. Then I moved on to identify the current anti-scam measures that are in use currently and how effective they are. To speculate the future, an understanding of technologies that are under research today is essential. I identified technologies like AI and Machine learning, Voice activated technology, Brain computer interface, Natural language processing that might have an impact on scamming in the future. These findings gave me directions for my design process.
I created design artifacts to illustrate the speculated future to stake holders. The artifacts include a bot that scams people, a job advertisement for recruiting a scammer, a book for learning and training the bot about scamming and a headgear that suppresses emotions. These artifacts are used to create a video prototype to tell a story to the stake holders. The basic concept of the story starts with scammers working in a cozy environment and uses an automated bot to scam. Since these scams prey on emotions, people use headgear that suppresses their emotions to stay safe from these scams. This video prototype is used to explain how all these artifacts work together to stake holders in form of a workshop to gain insights and create a discussion. These discussions are one of the main the success metrics for this project. The workshop provided various results and different perspectives towards scamming and anti-scamming measures.
This design project aims to create a discussion around what can we do today to create a safer society for people against scams and scammers.
