Experience Design · Product Design
I See U See I
Two people see through each other’s eyes — a raw, embodied antidote to the polished, filtered version of connection social media offers
Type
Student project
My role
Interaction designer
Period
6 weeks
Year
2025
Team
Iris Prelorentzou — Interaction Design
Anna Senko — Interaction Design
Design Task
Analog embodied social media
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Rethink social media as a physical, analog experience rather than a digital one.
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Design an interactive experience that requires a group to move and connect together.
Research
Learning How Social Media Shapes Identity
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Researched the impact of TikTok, Instagram and YouTube on identity and mental health, examining the gap between curated online personas and authentic self-expression
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Interviewed 8 young people (21-30 y.o.) to understand how their everyday social media habits shape self-perception, expectations, and emotional wellbeing
Research Findings
Problems
What Social Media Costs Us
Perfect Self
Social media pressures people into portraying a different, performed version of themselves
Comparison Trap
Constant social comparison chips away at self-esteem
Numbers Dependency
Validation shifts to likes, comments, and views instead of the content itself, fueling anxiety over missing out on trends
Attention Spam
Endless doom-scrolling eats up time and shrinks attention spans
Research Question
How might we design a physical, embodied alternative to social media that makes invisible human connection, feelings, intentions, presence, perceptible through the body itself?
Project Development
Analog Social Web
The goal of the first phase was to test a concept representing interconnected social bubbles, where followers blindly follow influencers, using physical pressure and anonymity to embody the pull and connection of digital social interaction
First User Testing
User’s Feedback
Invisible Becomes Visible
Online, closeness goes unnoticed, but in physical space, it becomes impossible to ignore
Communication Without Words
Once connected, people naturally organized into roles and communicated without needing to speak
Back to Raw
Reviving what social media once was: intuitive, unfiltered communication built on real connection
Design Process
Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes
To address user feedback, the next phase focused on making closeness and connection physical, letting people experience each other’s raw content directly, and creating conditions for communication to emerge naturally through working together
Iteration 2
Iteration 3
Iteration 4
Key Decisions
Seeing Through Other's Eye
A specialized helmet lets participants navigate space through someone else’s perspective, creating a raw, embodied alternative to filtered social media
Interconnected Movement
A ring dress connects participants by string, so each person’s movement directly influences and is influenced by the others
Build to Be DIY
The whole system is designed to be assembled and used as an open, distributable DIY project
Equal Influence
Every participant holds the same level of influence, so the group must work together to navigate and achieve the result
Project’s Evolution
Handmade Production
The final phase involved hand-producing 8 complete mask-dress sets and developing a brand concept to present the installation as a cohesive product
Production of 8 Mask-Dress Sets
Personal Set Includes:
Mask
Rings Dress
Number Tag
Phone with Zoom
Outcome
Embodied Social Media Set
Let me see through you. And me
Unfiltered Content
Users provide content without ever seeing it themselves, making it inherently raw and unpolished, unlike curated social media
Physical Connections
Vision and strings physically link participants, turning invisible social connection into something visible that only group work can navigate
A Shift in Perspective
Seeing through someone else’s eyes, including seeing yourself from the outside, opens an entirely new way of looking at the world
Takeaways
Analog Is a Key
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Analog experiences can create more impact than digital solutions ever could
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Embodiment drew people into the moment, making them genuinely present and invested
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It’s easy to lose sight of an idea’s original purpose while “improving” it, so this project became a step back toward social media’s original goal: real connection and communication