Measuring to better judge
“Digital measurement interfaces, scores, streaks, usage indicators, promise to help individuals manage their behavior. Yet these devices do not simply inform: they produce implicit norms and turn deviation into visible fault.”
Cahier Ethno-Design, Strate × Renault
“This project explores how the quantification of mobility transforms individual decisions into visible collective arbitrations.”
Romain Rubens & Erwan Hodonou
Digital measurement interfaces, scores, streaks, usage indicators, promise to help individuals manage their behavior more effectively. Yet these devices do not simply inform: they produce implicit norms, turn deviation into visible fault, and establish affective self-discipline. Measurement becomes an instrument of power when surveillance is internalized by individuals themselves.
Measuring to judge?
When performance becomes visible and comparable, quantification devices transform everyday experience into permanent moral judgment. It is no longer just a technical data point, it becomes a potential fault.
Household Quota
An extension of the My Renault app that assigns a shared weekly kilometer quota to an entire household. Every trip made is deducted from the shared quota, making individual trade-offs visible.
The household as a unit
Mobility decisions are negotiated at the household level. Car sharing, trip trade-offs, distribution of mobility resources. The individual decision becomes a visible collective arbitration.
Discipline through visibility
Behavioral regulation works through visibility and the internalization of norms rather than direct constraint. By making trips comparable and shareable, the interface organizes horizontal surveillance among users.
Shame as an interface
When the gap becomes visible, shame appears on its own. The interface does not forbid, it exposes. The driver is not accused, but positioned.
Workaround
While these interfaces promise to help users manage themselves better, users develop strategies to escape the judgment they produce.
The project designs an extension of My Renault imagining a shared weekly kilometer quota at the household level. Every trip made by a member is deducted from the shared quota, making individual trade-offs visible and turning each mobility decision into a collective act. If the quota is exceeded, the overage is recorded and visible to every household member. The artifact materializes the tension between individual mobility freedom and collective responsibility toward shared resources.
A project made in collaboration with Erwan Hodonou, as part of the Critical Thinking and Prospective Design course led by Fanny Parise, anthropologist, co-director of the ManagIA research chair and lecturer in humanities and social sciences at Strate École de Design Lyon, in partnership with Renault.