Welcome to the Reason Emotion Will Setup Wizard
Step 1 of 1
Making an office’s unspoken emotional life readable in AR
Goal
A self-initiated AR concept (NYU ITP) that makes the gap between what is said and what is felt at work visible — letting people see themselves and their colleagues as living characters on a shared map of the office’s actual emotional state. Readable, not surveilled.
Challenge
The information that matters most at work is what nobody says aloud — emotions, movement, relational friction. Surfacing that layer without triggering the defensiveness surveillance always causes meant visibility had to feel like self-knowledge, not exposure.
Outcome
Make the felt layer visible and it stops being something each person carries alone — it becomes something a team can point to and work on together.
The gap between what is said and what is felt compounds silently until it becomes dysfunction. This concept borrows the logic of the Marauder’s Map — show where people are, judge no one — and asks what changes when the office’s emotional state becomes readable to everyone.
The premise
- Said vs. felt — the gap compounds silently into dysfunction
- Borrow the Marauder’s Map logic: show where people are, judge no one
- Make the office’s emotional state something everyone can read
Neutrality became the design principle. Emotion reads as ambient aura rather than diagnostic label, so people interpret instead of getting diagnosed; path data is anonymized by default and shown to you about yourself before it aggregates for a team. Closer to reading a room than being read.
Design principles
- Observational, not evaluative
- Emotion as ambient aura, not diagnostic labels
- Path data anonymized by default
- Self before team — you see yourself first
- Reading a room, not being read