By Elaine, Holly, Nadja

It’s impossible not to notice the Octopus card when you stay in Hong Kong. It’s an electronic card that can be used for public transport, as well as the purchases in the supermarket, restaurants, vending machines and more. In a way, the Octopus card provides great convenience to our lives. Using the Octopus card makes the society more progressive and efficient. On the one hand, it reduced the manual labor during the payment process. On the other hand, it also provides more convenient lifestyle for citizens. The whole connection between Octopus card and users is like a “system”.

A system refers to an interacting group of items based on its own function. The Octopus card stores the information of where you have been and what you consumed. That is to say, we could gather certain information by the card. Our group mainly focused on how octopus tracks people’s information. We also did some research before determine the core of project: what is this “animal” card and what happens in the background?

The Octopus card stores personal information. What happened if somebody gets hold of it and reads it? Your analogue and digital life come together and become one. But does it? If we would have all your data, would be able to read it? Yes we would. But the outcome doesn’t have to be the image of what you think is your real life in terms of privacy and time possibilites. We found a lot of images and information at the social media accounts of the other participants and teachers.

With these background we tried to interpret the data as we wouldn’t know the person – as a weird machine would do. Additionally we drew the profile pictures to add them to the new interpreted data. Building a connection between machine and people is what we want to push forward.