Some problems are difficult to dramatise because they have no physical form. Distraction happens inside a screen. Tracking happens silently. Hunger is felt rather than seen. Corruption is distributed across a system. Fraudsters hide behind voices and messages. Personification gives those problems something audiences can confront. Here are six ways to personify the problem.
- Turn the invisible intruder human
- Give the problem a voice
- Turn the problem into a creature
- Condense the system into one person
- Give the hidden perpetrator a face
- Cast the danger as the villain
1. Turn the Invisible Intruder Human
Give an unseen force a body and make it physically behave the way it behaves invisibly.
Clingers — Apple · TBWA\Media Arts Lab · 2026
Online tracking is intrusive precisely because most of it happens without us seeing it. Apple made that intrusion physical. In Clingers, chrome-suited figures attach themselves to ordinary people, follow them around and peer into what they are doing online. They do not simply represent trackers. They behave like tracking behaves. Once translated into the social rules of the physical world, something users routinely tolerate digitally suddenly looks invasive, absurd and deeply uncomfortable.
Uninterrupted — Google Pixel, Google in-house, 2026 turns digital distractions into actual people barging into a conversation. Notifications stop being harmless screen activity and become socially intolerable interruptions.
2. Give the Problem a Voice
Let something normally silent say what it knows, wants or is doing to us.
The Waiting Room — Apple · TBWA\Media Arts Lab · 2023
Health data usually disappears quietly into digital systems. Apple imagined what would happen if that information stopped being silent. In a doctor's waiting room, an unseen voice begins broadcasting intimate health details about the people sitting there. The narrator effectively becomes the privacy breach itself, publicly saying everything the digital world may know privately. The execution does not explain why health-data privacy matters. It lets the audience experience the social horror of that information suddenly finding a voice.
This route becomes especially useful when the problem involves something being collected, concealed or done without acknowledgement. Ask what the problem would say if it could no longer keep quiet.
