Tether

What Inspired Us

It began with a feeling many people recognize but rarely have words for. You walk into a room full of people, smile, participate, and do everything expected yet leave feeling more alone than when you arrived. Nothing visibly went wrong, but your body was quietly signaling discomfort the entire time, and you had no way of understanding it. This led us to a central question: if we have fitness trackers for every heartbeat, why don’t we have tools that help us understand social exhaustion? As we explored this idea further, we kept coming back to one concept belonging. The more we researched, the clearer it became that the signals of social comfort and discomfort already exist within our bodies and environments; they simply haven’t been translated into an interface people can perceive or understand.

What We Learned

We explored designing for unexplored human senses beyond the traditional five, investigating what these senses are and how their signals could potentially be measured or visualized. We experimented with speculative, future-forward concepts, avoiding generic solutions to imagine new ways technology could reveal hidden sensory experiences. Using AI-assisted ideation within Figma, we rapidly tested ideas while collaborating and refining concepts as a team.

How We Built It

We began by exploring why people often feel anxious or uncertain in social spaces and what makes conversations difficult to navigate. Through research on social behavior, body signals, and environmental cues, we identified how people subconsciously sense comfort or tension in a room. This led us to the concept of Social Attunement, combining physiological signals with environmental sensing to guide social interactions. We designed an ecosystem consisting of a wearable band, MR glasses, and a mobile app for insights and reflection, and prototyped the experience through UI flows, scenarios, and visual designs.

Challenges We Faced

Designing Tether involved several key challenges. Social dynamics are complex and subtle, making it difficult to translate abstract social signals into clear and meaningful insights. We also had to balance providing assistance with preserving natural human interaction, ensuring the system supports users without interrupting or controlling their behavior. Another challenge was designing a minimal MR interface, where visual cues remain subtle and helpful without overwhelming the user’s perception of the real environment. Additionally, working with sensitive biometric data required careful consideration of privacy, security, and responsible data use. Finally, we had to find effective ways to visualize an otherwise invisible process combining internal physiological signals and environmental sensing into a clear, understandable experience for users.