ReasonEmotionWill
What the Marauder's Map knows about your office that nobody says out loud.
- Category
- Visual Design
- Year
- 2022
- Services
- UI/UX, AR Design, Creative Technology
Type
Concept · NYU ITP
Discipline
AR / creative technology
Focus
Spatial interaction · embodied UI
Overview
Augmented reality that makes the office's unspoken emotional life readable — without turning it into surveillance.
In any workplace, the gap between what is said and what is felt creates friction that compounds silently until it becomes dysfunction. This project asks what changes when that gap is made visible — letting each person see themselves and their colleagues as living characters in a shared map of the office's actual emotional state.
The challenge
The iceberg problem in workplaces is not a lack of information — it's that the information that matters most is the kind nobody says aloud. Emotions, movement patterns, relational friction, and efficiency gaps all exist below the surface, shaping outcomes that get attributed to strategy or process. The design challenge was to surface that submerged layer without triggering the defensiveness that surveillance always creates. Visibility had to feel like self-knowledge, not exposure.
I borrowed the logic of the Marauder's Map: show where people are, judge no one.
That neutrality became the design principle — the AR layer had to feel observational, not evaluative. Emotion states were represented as ambient aura rather than diagnostic labels, so users interpret rather than get diagnosed. Path data was anonymized by default, visible to individuals about themselves before being aggregated for teams. The goal was to make the experience feel more like reading a room than being read.
§ Interaction model
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.