NABS and Amplify FUTURES promote intentional scrolling on World Mental Health Day

A new film featuring the DoomScroller robot highlights the impact of our online behaviours. 

Are you in control of your scroll? Imagine if you could see the impact your scrolls have on your mental health. 

Amplify’s innovation practice FUTURES has collaborated with Kai Lab’s Creative Technologist, Sean Malikides to create the DoomScroller robot. The initiative, which is supported by NABS, the advertising industry's wellbeing charity, promotes the importance of intentional scrolling on social media .

The film features the DoomScroller robot prototype measuring social media behaviour and giving a receipt on the user's mental health. The aim isn’t to demonise social media, instead, it aims to highlight how we can all scroll more intentionally. 

Working in collaboration with Sean Malikides, the Amplify FUTURES, a part of brand experience agency Amplify, the team built a prototype DoomScroller to prove their hypothesis that understanding our online actions will allow us to have greater control. Merging the physical and digital worlds, the DoomScroller allows us to see a greater cause and effect of our digital actions, making our actions in the digital world visible. 

Ed Hallam, FUTURES leader and Amplify Innovation Creative Director, said: “The DoomScroller is an incredibly exciting prototype from our newly formed innovation practice Amplify FUTURES. We’re thrilled to have collaborated with Sean Malikides to explore our relationships with the digital world, challenging the status quo for social media behaviours and adding real weight to our actions online – these are all principles that make for a FUTURES experiment that puts people at the centre.”

Lou Thomspon, Marketing Director, NABS, added: “Mental health issues continue to rise in our industry with many factors contributing to this, we continue to see this upward trend on our Advice Line, with emotional support being the top reason for contact - representing one-third of the 4,500 calls we took last year. To thrive we need to put conversations and action about improving our collective mental wellness at the heart of what we do. At NABS our purpose is to advance the mental wellness of our industry community. It’s great to have FUTURES contributing towards this.” 

FUTURES is Amplify’s dedicated innovation practice focused on exploring the interconnected space between creative technology, entertainment and IP. FUTURES runs an experiment series designed to build and test new ideas at speed, creating prototypes to drive the future of experience and campaign storytelling. In the last 18 months, Amplify has collaborated with Creative Technologists from across a variety of disciplines including Eoghan O’Keaffe, an AI specialist, and Tigris Li, an Artist and Creative Technologist whose collaborative work with FUTURES will be showcased in Summer 2024. FUTURES believe in the power of community so will be inviting brands and audiences to be a part of this work, making it possible to download code and access research through a series of prototype drops.