This is an immersive article concept that explores why humans anthropomorphize, or give human traits to, machines.
The article serves as both a personalized look into the user's own interaction with machines as well as an informational source with experts' opinions on the topic.
Information architecture
The user is taken on a bit of an unconventional journey, prompted first to take a short baseline quiz about her own habits before being led to the homepage.
The user is directed to her quiz results, which scores her level of anthropomorphic tendencies from 1 to 10. Then, the user creates an account with an email and password so she could compare results on subsequent visits.
Finally, the user is taken to the main article page. These are the basic building blocks of the piece.
This is the high-fidelity design for the main page.
Depending on which explore button the user chooses, she will be taken to the exploration of one side of the debate or the other. Or, if she chooses to click the arrow or scroll, she will be taken to the first side of the argument seen below.
Each section will be accompanied by a video for the user to click to play. Upon clicking, the robot claw to the right "grabs" the video to make it fill more of the screen.
After watching the video, the user rates how much she agrees with the expert's opinion on a scale of 1 to 10 .
After the user watches or reads several experts' opinions for both sides of the argument and gives agreement ratings, the site will calculate another score on the 1-10 scale to compare to the baseline results.
The goal of this article isn't to prove whether or not human machine anthropomorphization is necessary to our understanding and usage of machines. Rather, the experience is meant to inform and excite users about how their ways of thinking about machines can craft the future.
