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Zhiqing Pan

6 updates, last on Oct 11, 2026

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Questions this week

Week 5

This week, I asked how institutions transform uncertain evidence into official truth. I explored three related questions: How can an institution translate personal observations into a diagnosis? How can a system train people to distrust their own judgment? How can ordinary health conditions be translated into judgments about a person’s morality and social value?

Week 4

This week, I began asking how ideas of madness, illness, and recovery have changed across different historical periods. I was especially interested in how doctors and institutions decided which behaviors counted as evidence of mental illness.

Week 3

I continued exploring my central inquiry: How do people construct a belief in causality when the connections between evidence, outcomes remain invisible or uncertain? Through the prototypes, this inquiry developed into several related questions. How do multiple independent actions collectively produce a shared outcome? How do viewers use limited images to complete missing causal connections? How do visual prominence and authoritative interfaces influence which evidence appears relevant? When an outcome is already known, do people reason backward and selectively search for evidence that supports it?

Week 2

How do people construct a belief in causality when the connection between evidence, action, and outcome remains invisible or uncertain?

Week 1

This week, I have been thinking about why people connect someone’s actions with events that happen later, even when the causal relationship cannot be directly proven. I also began considering how karma, attribution bias, confirmation bias, and emotional rumination may shape these connections. From a design perspective, I am interested in whether sequence, juxtaposition, repetition, and interaction can change how viewers understand cause and consequence. To some extent, it is somewhat similar to the mechanism that has been studied before.

Weel 6: Provotype

This week, I was thinking about how institutions turn uncertain evidence into a believable truth. I also asking why people continue to follow a system even when they know it may be wrong.

Research discoveries

Week 5

According to the questions, I developed three ideas,The first is an Institutional Translation Report. Participants describe ambiguous images without knowing the real context. Their uncertain observations are then translated into diagnostic language, risk scores, and institutional decisions. The second is a Reality Alignment Test. The questions gradually move from normal answers to incorrect and absurd answers. The participant can only pass by accepting the answer provided by the institution. This prototype makes “recovery through agreement” into an interactive experience. The third is a Moral Translation Index. Participants select ordinary conditions such as anxiety, fatigue, stomach pain, or insomnia. A hidden system translates these conditions into scores for self discipline, work capacity, emotional control.

Week 4

Through This Way Madness Lies, I explored how mental patients were understood and treated differently across historical periods. I realized that the same behavior could receive completely different explanations depending on the dominant medical/religious/institutional framework. Once an authority established a diagnosis, later evidence could be used to confirm that diagnosis rather than question it.

Week 3

I began with several separate prototypes, including the comparison between two pigs and the causal verification grid. However, I realized that I lacked a narrative container that could support a deeper and more systematic investigation. I therefore began using Snatch as a shared structure for the research. The film is particularly useful because several apparently separate timelines eventually intersect. Almost every character wants the diamond, yet it ultimately reaches the protagonists who were least interested in possessing it. The film itself functions as a visible causal mechanism, while most of its characters can only perceive their own limited actions. This helped shift my research away from karma primarily as a religious concept and toward a broader investigation of causality, hidden connections, and power. I became interested in how outcomes can emerge from multiple actions rather than a single intention, and how design can make certain connections visible while causing others to disappear.

Week 2

I explored this question from three directions. The Piltdown Man hoax showed how apparently scientific evidence can be shaped by prior expectations. Karma and leap of faith showed how belief can continue without a visible causal mechanism. Research on online dating showed that more information can create a rejection mindset rather than greater certainty.

Week 1

My research began with confirmation bias but gradually expanded to attribution bias, emotional rumination, and different cultural understandings of karma. I realized that these concepts are not identical. Instead, they participate in different stages of constructing a causal narrative. Attribution bias influences how people identify causes, confirmation bias influences which evidence they notice, emotional rumination repeatedly returns them to the same experience, and karma provides a cultural framework for connecting actions with future consequences. I was surprised to learn that karma is not simply about reward or punishment. It can also describe how actions create habits and tendencies that continue to shape later experiences. I also discovered that the Buddhist Wheel of Existence historically translated relationships among action, mental state, and consequence into a cyclical visual structure.

Weel 6: Provotype

I tested three past prototypes. The most important finding came from the Reality Alignment Test. Participants knew that the system was giving incorrect answers, but they continued and began searching for the answers the system wanted.

Other work

Week 5

I designed the visual materials for all three prototypes, including observation records, institutional reports, risk scores, symptom questionnaires, and final evaluation forms. I also developed a p5.js program with questions that become increasingly unreasonable. Together, the three prototypes examine different stages of institutional judgment: collecting evidence, training agreement, and translating health into moral value.

Week 4

I presented the development of my inquiry and seven prototypes from the past four weeks. I also began connecting my earlier research on causality and confirmation bias to the history of mental institutions. This opened a new direction about how authority defines evidence and turns uncertain interpretations into accepted explanations.

Week 3

PROTOTYPE：a large causal map of Snatch, four fragmented image chains, a causal verification grid, an action symbol system, causal storytelling cards, a causal interpretation wheel, and a visual comparison between two pigs. Across these prototypes, I experimented with removing, simplifying, rearranging, and visually framing evidence. Each prototype responded to a limitation found in the previous one. This process helped me distinguish between constructing a causal story from actions and reconstructing causes backward from an already known outcome.

Week 2

This week, I expanded my collection of references and tested different cases against the three research directions. Some cases did not fit perfectly, but they helped reveal further questions. For example, West Elm Caleb made me consider how audiences and brands collectively create what they describe as someone’s karma, and how they might understand their own participation if the original judgment later proves mistaken. I also examined cases involving NASA and a Japanese plane crash. Comparing, selecting, and sometimes rejecting these materials helped me organize the research into a clearer structure.

Week 1

I compared the broader development of karma in ancient Indian traditions with the Buddhist interpretation of karmic action. I also clarified the differences among attribution bias, confirmation bias, and emotional rumination. In addition, I collected visual references such as the Wheel of Existence, the Mnemosyne Atlas, and an interactive visual communication project to examine how abstract causal relationships can be represented through cycles, juxtaposition, sequence, and interaction.

Weel 6: Provotype

I realized that my current prototypes already contain a predetermined conclusion. Participants are receiving my argument rather than producing new insights. At first I thought this like a frame confirmation bias, and try to make it as a metaphor of bias from previous reading. But turns out the experiment is closer to obedience and gaslighting than confirmation bias.

Other questions or notes

Week 5

No

Week 4

No

Week 3

None

Week 2

I also want to explore how these questions can become a communication design investigation rather than remain only psychological or religious topics. My next step is to identify which cases reveal this structure most clearly and to find counterexamples that challenge my current assumptions.

Week 1

I am still exploring the connections between these concepts and looking for new elements and directions, so that I do not fall into confirmation bias within my own research process.

Weel 6: Provotype

NO

References

Week 5

Week 4

Mike Jay, This Way Madness Lies: The Asylum and Beyond. Thames & Hudson, 2016.

Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. Free Press, 1991.

Week 3

Snatch, directed by Guy Ritchie, 2000

Jennifer E. Yopchick and Kim A. Kim, Hindsight Bias and Causal Reasoning: A Minimalist Approach

Week 2

Research paper 2019A Rejection Mind-Set: Choice Overload in Online DatingTila M. Pronk, Jaap J. A. DenissenSocial Psychological and Personality Science
Paper · journals.sagepub.com
About this paper

The paradox of modern dating is that online platforms provide more opportunities to find a romantic partner than ever before, but people are nevertheless more likely to be single. We hypothesized the existence of a rejection mind-set: The continued access to virtually unlimited potential partners…

Week 1

Weel 6: Provotype