Good question. Or maybe in the direction of Professor Xavier's machine that (IIRC) taps him into zillions of people's experiences in parallel, but also with bar graphs? Feel everything and then zoom in to the specific?
A pretty effective approach is something like ICIJ has done https://projects.icij.org/fatalextraction/
We're working on generating those efficiently from collected data, but you still need an author of sorts.
Ultimately that's still in the slide deck realm, though.
A possibly less familiar solution is what's called Executive Briefing Centers that can get pretty Minority Report-like: a wall of screens with an interactive display (mouse/keyboard/script driven). Those presentations are curated and composed (think $100k slide decks or maybe a 1-off immersive video game) to get deep into understanding how a customer segment would experience a new product in a new store (is what I've seen).
Folks like IDEO have done some experiments with 3D cameras and VR.
When I've tried it, I found the non-eye-contact disturbing ("And you can't smell the shit," as a friend put it). It's one thing to not speak the language. Quite another to not know what the ritual you're observing means to the participants (the VR scene I'm thinking of dropped you into a "sacred African dance around a fire").
An important distinction here is about reporting vs interacting.
We say interaction is paramount. But it doesn't really scale--numbers do. That's kindof the point of the article: both have their place.
The goal isn't to traumatize _more_ people, it's to communicate--effect a sharing of worlds--with the hope of breaking cycles of trauma and violence. Like some counseling techniques, maybe numeric abstraction provides a necessary distance from the immediacy of experience that allows us to get a handle on things and make change.
Insight Share and the participatory video folks are pushing the limits with current tech. There you get into enabling folks to solve their own problems, no need to convince donors.
There's an empowering irony in using iPhones or Occuli to interview tantalum/coltan/tin miners. But I bet if we asked them, they'd have some pretty sweet ideas for where/how to direct the talent and resources being used to develop the devices to help them...
A pretty effective approach is something like ICIJ has done https://projects.icij.org/fatalextraction/ We're working on generating those efficiently from collected data, but you still need an author of sorts. Ultimately that's still in the slide deck realm, though.
A possibly less familiar solution is what's called Executive Briefing Centers that can get pretty Minority Report-like: a wall of screens with an interactive display (mouse/keyboard/script driven). Those presentations are curated and composed (think $100k slide decks or maybe a 1-off immersive video game) to get deep into understanding how a customer segment would experience a new product in a new store (is what I've seen).
Folks like IDEO have done some experiments with 3D cameras and VR. When I've tried it, I found the non-eye-contact disturbing ("And you can't smell the shit," as a friend put it). It's one thing to not speak the language. Quite another to not know what the ritual you're observing means to the participants (the VR scene I'm thinking of dropped you into a "sacred African dance around a fire").
An important distinction here is about reporting vs interacting. We say interaction is paramount. But it doesn't really scale--numbers do. That's kindof the point of the article: both have their place. The goal isn't to traumatize _more_ people, it's to communicate--effect a sharing of worlds--with the hope of breaking cycles of trauma and violence. Like some counseling techniques, maybe numeric abstraction provides a necessary distance from the immediacy of experience that allows us to get a handle on things and make change.
Insight Share and the participatory video folks are pushing the limits with current tech. There you get into enabling folks to solve their own problems, no need to convince donors.
There's an empowering irony in using iPhones or Occuli to interview tantalum/coltan/tin miners. But I bet if we asked them, they'd have some pretty sweet ideas for where/how to direct the talent and resources being used to develop the devices to help them...
Thanks for the question!