For my undergraduate senior thesis, I designed, developed, and shipped a voice application related to Stoic philosophy. Once I graduated, I took this on as a personal project to refine my conversation design skills. As of 2020, Stoic Insights is publicly available on the Alexa Skill Store.
This project has been an incredibly valuable learning experience. It was exciting to see conversational principles working alongside design principles – merging my education in linguistics with my training in UX design for the first time.
While researching problem spaces to design for, I was consistently drawn to the issue of mental health. In searching for ways to address this sensitive issue with real people in mind, I recalled how useful Stoic philosophy was for me during some challenging moments of my own life.
As I took this approach, I was met with plenty of resistance. The term "stoic" has a vaguely negative connotation in English. Importantly, Stoic philosophy doesn't promote repressing or ignoring emotions in the way that the term "stoic" is typically used.
Historically, Stoicism is an ancient Greek philosophy which was founded in Athens in the 3rd century BCE. Stoic thought promotes a cultivated sense of social belonging, a radical acceptance of hardship, and an internal locus of control regardless of external circumstance.
Stoic Insights is a modest attempt to share this wisdom using voice technology.
“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
- Taleb Nassim Nicholas
Throughout the design and development process, I also created a logo for the application.
The Stoic Insights logo is a rendition of Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor and Stoic Philosopher. Aurelius' Meditations was the first work of Stoic philosophy I encountered.
The logo symbolizes internal and external spheres of understanding and control, while maintaining a sense of minimalism.
My first step was to collect quotes from Stoic philosophy. Regardless of the specific form the application would take, I knew that it would require a large body of text to work with. This collection has been steadily growing steadily since February, 2019.
Retrieved from http://atlasofemotions.org/#states/sadness
Then, I explored the spectrum of human emotional experience. In my research, I discovered The Eckmans' Atlas of Emotion, an interactive tool created by the Dalai Lama and Emotion Psychologists Paul and Eve Eckman. This project defines five categories of emotional life, each with distinct levels of intensity: Anger, Fear, Disgust, Sadness, and Enjoyment
Retrieved from http://atlasofemotions.org/#states/sadness
The purpose of this tool is to build a 'map of emotions' through detailed vocabularies and visualizations, and to provide strategies to recognize and manage complex emotional states.
I created five Google Spreadsheets to use as databases, and populated them with quotes using Eckmans' Atlas of Emotions as a guide. Then, I made each database accessible to external API calls.
I used VoiceFlow to create a conversational user flow for the application. The flow above uses branching API calls to correspond with the five emotional quote databases, with one flow saved for unrecognized inputs.
To make sense of the tangled mess above, Stoic Insights can be broken down into three stages: input, processing, and output
The first turns of the conversation processes user input into an emotional category using slots, or variables within an utterance.
In this example, the {sad} slot contains synonyms ranging from "disappointed" to "miserable". The utterances to the right are the contexts where the {sad} slot will be recognized and send to the next step.
Next, a line of JavaScript generates a random number corresponding to the number of entries in its database. In this example, the quote database for sadness has 48 entries.
An API call selects the appropriate database and pulls the randomized result, which will be sent to output.
The output block speaks the result back to the user with a follow-up prompt. The user then chooses to end the conversation, or hear another insight.
A user can tell Stoic Insights a wide variety of emotional states.
The application supports follow-up conversation turns, help requests, and cancellations at any point of the conversation.
This example uses Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) to alter prosody elements such as the intonation, emphasis, and rhythm of speech.
I presented this application as a Minimum Viable Prototype at Miami University's Undergraduate Research Symposium. The image above is the poster I created for this event.
As an exercise in conversation design, I was in an interesting position while designing this application at school. Since conversation design is still such a young field, my professors and advisors could only provide general encouragement and feedback about my progress.
I grew comfortable finding my own answers, and became more driven to seek out growth and mentorship in this field.
All things considered, I'm pleased to have this project as the starting point in my journey as a Conversational UX Designer.
