Inspiration
My team initially received a lot of inspiration from science fiction portrayals of artificial intelligence. Specifically we looked at media portrayals of conscious technology like the androids in Westworld or the artifically intelligent voice assistant, Samantha from the movie Her.
When looking at these portrayals, the depictions form an interesting binary - one, depicting conscious technology as embittered and vengeful, even rightfully so for their mistreatment at the hands of humans, and on the other side - being depicted as naive, even pitiful. Both almost always led to an arc of self-actualization and liberation, either in violence or peace.
There's something about artificial intelligence that feels exciting but deadly, like we are at the precipice of something grand and awful.
Labor as an Identity
The other major source of inspiration for me personally was labor. Particularly, our obsession with associating labor with our identity. Whether it's centering our entire early life on what college and job field we want to go into or it's identifying ourselves by the jobs we do - we live in a society where our labor output is closely associated with our value in society.
Our used objects reflect this back to us. They are defined by the outputs they provide.
Silly AI
AI is all the buzz these days. It's in our security systems, saving our faces into a nefariously hidden blackbox of biometric algorithms. It's augmenting our ability to detect hatespeech and send way too accurately targeted ads. In fiction, it's turning metal machines into superintelligent robots or vengeful death angels.
Why are machines imbued with intelligence so productive for better or for worse? We wondered what an ordinary object imbued with intelligence might be like in it's mundane, everyday life. What if everyday objects could reject the task-oriented meaning we give them?
Casper is a smart box who does his job badly because he can.
The Box
The box caught our attention because of it's ubiquity. As an object, it is used to store things. Functionally, it's simple, commonly understood in purpose, and usually valuable for how it augments other things.