Advice from a Caterpillar: an Application for Cultural Computing about the Self

We are exploring an application for a novel direction in humancomputer interaction named ‘cultural computing’, which aims to provide a new medium for cultural translation. The main objective of this project is to create an interactive experience that encourages people to reflect on their self-concept. In Western culture the self-concept is generally based on conscious perception of the self. The story ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ survived for over centuries, and therefore seems to be a promising narrative to address this issue. The user in the role of Alice will go through the interactive experience and meets a Caterpillar, who questions the participant’s whereabouts of his/her selfconcept. To determine the effect of this experience, we discuss a method that measures changes in a person’s implicit self-concept for we predict that the experience will have an unconscious effect towards individual metamorphosis. The ‘implicit association test’ (IAT) seems to be a promising measure.