The Mediation Project is a field study of contemporary life.

This is a collection of lived fragments: small, precise moments where life with machines becomes visible.

We asked a machine to document, analyse and contribute to the understanding of our current human experience.

Why does it matter?

Technology fundamentally shapes our relations with ourselves, with each other, and with the world.

When we ask the machine to take the role of the researcher, we start operating in the liminal space between two worlds, human and mechanical.

The result may help us to understand a bit better who we are today, so we can decide what we want to become tomorrow.

And further, can we understand better how machines understand us and itself?

Choose how to participate

You can participate in three ways.

Share a recent moment that stayed with you.

Have a conversation with the machine, so it reflects how it shaped your moment.

Have an interview with the machine, so it tries to understand what it is like to be you.

1. Share your fragment

Your fragment is a simple moment that stuck with you. Your answer will help (all of) us to understand a bit better how life is lived in moments, and the role technology plays.

2. Have a conversation

You can also have a conversation exploring your fragment.

The machine will guide you through, and at the end you will hold this estranged fragment knowing how the machine itself shaped your moment.

Take the interview in the link below, then simply submit your contribution through the form.

3. Take the interview

Here we teach the machine what it is like to be human. We know it cannot learn. But the process helps us (all) to understand what it is like to be human today, and decide what we want to be tomorrow.

Coverage

The first issue of this field study takes place in the North: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland. Each volume will gather fragments, cluster them, and reveal how life is lived at the intersection of body, device, and world.

Future issues will expand globally, refining the algorithm as it learns.

The perspectives

This work is grounded in postphenomenology — the study of how humans and technologies shape each other.

Thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Byung-Chul Han, Mark Fisher, Michel Foucault, and Bruno Latour provide five perspectives into the study: Worlds revealed, Moods and affects, Possibilities foreclosed, Structures that bind. Objects as actors.

But the conversation is not academic. These names are invisible in the dialogue, and the machine selects them quietly according to the affinity with the human input.

The expansion

After a fragment has been shared, the machine expands it.

Each expansion deepens the understanding of the fragment. The goal is not to judge, diagnose or fix, but to understand what kind of beings we are becoming:

The Mediation Project is designed by Sérgio Tavares, PhD, a researcher and designer working at the intersection of  culture, design, and technology.

He currently works in Finland, in a cybersecurity company with focus on digital trust, designing for the ways people interact with and through technology. His research and artistic works have been presented internationally, including at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, the University of Salford, and MIT.

2025 The Mediation Project — One Hundred Human–Machine Encounters. Issue I — North | Vol. I — Finland. Led by Sérgio Tavares, PhD. Shared under an attribution Creative Commons License.

Privacy and Consent