Overview
Mediated is a speculative interactive system examining how everyday experience becomes dependent on technological mediation.
The project imagines a near-future condition where AR contact lenses function as compulsory infrastructure, linking memory archives, urban access, and personal visibility to continuous device authentication.
Design Challenge
How might an interactive system expose the consequences of infrastructural dependency on mediated perception and memory?
Rather than proposing a solution, the project makes a hidden contemporary condition visible: the way documentation increasingly comes before direct experience.
Current Situation
At concerts, sunsets, and public events, people often raise the camera before fully experiencing the moment. Documentation becomes the default mode of presence.
Mediated exaggerates this behaviour into a future where recording is no longer optional, but becomes a condition for access, memory, and participation.
System Concept
The system is based on three interaction rules:
Recording is required for archive access.
Device authentication governs memory retrieval.
Lens removal triggers loss of access to memory and urban services.
In this project, interaction logic becomes the argument. The user can choose to comply, ignore, or disconnect, but each action produces a different system consequence.
Scenario Development
Three interaction scenarios were developed to test how the same system logic could produce different emotional and functional consequences.
Concept Evolution
The project initially began as a voluntary smartphone app, but developed into a wider speculative infrastructure. AR contact lenses replaced the phone as the primary interface, making mediation structural rather than optional.
This shift allowed the project to explore how dependency could extend beyond personal memory into transport, services, commercial spaces, and public access.
System Logic & Flow
The system flow maps the experience across three stages: Setting Up, Using the App, and After Recording.
The flow is structured around two major decision points: whether the user wears the lens, and whether they choose to record. Each decision produces a different memory or access state.
Figma Development
The high-fidelity prototype was designed in Figma, covering onboarding, AR lens connection, city access, recording prompts, memory archive states, and authentication failure screens.
Final Design Solution
The archive is the conceptual centre of the prototype. Verified memories are fully accessible, unrecorded moments become Memory Not Found states, and lens removal triggers a locked archive with denied infrastructure access.
Refinement & Testing
Early versions of the prototype relied on a single viewpoint, which limited the clarity of spatial relationships and system interactions.
To improve this, varied camera angles were introduced, including close-up views, wider environmental shots, and perspective shifts. These changes helped communicate spatial context, interaction states, and system feedback more effectively.
Close-up · Mid-shot · Wide shot — improving spatial readability and interaction clarity
Experience Prototype
Reflection
This project helped me understand how interaction design can function as a critical argument. Instead of explaining dependency directly, the system makes users experience it through access, restriction, archive loss, and enforced authentication.
The most important design insight was that consequence does not need to be immediate to be felt. A delayed archive gap can be more unsettling than direct punishment.