FUTURE CONCEPT
PRISMap
Designing for a future of BCI & wearables: your emotional world, made visible.
Overview
Wearable technology is moving beyond the wrist, into skin patches, smart earbuds, and non-invasive neural interfaces. PRISMap is designed for that future: a speculative tool that uses BCI and wearable input to visualize the emotional experience of conversations, designing for capabilities that don't yet exist.
Role
Product Designer
Team
4 Designers
Tools
Figma
Figma Make
Timeline
4 Day Design Sprint
Mar 2026
THE PROBLEM
When Emotion is Highest, Words are Fewest
Arguments with people we love and breakthroughs in therapy are some of the moments we often struggle most to put into words. By the time you want to reflect back, the felt texture of what happened already fades by the time you're reflecting.
APPROACH
PRISMap: your emotions made visible
An app that translates data from your wearables and BCI into your visual emotional world.
OUTCOMES
Measuring Emotional Literacy
Tracking emotional distinctions over time makes personal growth visible in a way self-reporting never could.
Future of Self-Knowledge
Passive capture over manual input entirely makes the tool most useful exactly when emotions are highest.
INITIAL FINDINGS
Feeling and language don't happen at the same time.
Consolidating insights from 30+ user surveys & interviews.
01
The Articulation Gap
57% of participants reported needing hours to days to understand what they felt during a conversation.
02
Emotion Fading Window
54% of participants identified recalling how they felt after a conversation as a barrier to processing.
"How might we help people recognize and understand their emotional experience after a conversation before it fades?"
ADDRESSING THE GAP
Current wellness tools need manual input, losing emotional details.
Manual input can't capture the full emotional scale of conversations.
DESIGNING FOR THE FUTURE
The body & mind already records what you can't articulate.
Sensors required to quantify this either exist or are emerging rapidly, showing us that the gap between what exists today and the full vision is solely a technology gap.
THE SOLUTION
Diving deep into emotional science
01
Constructed, Not Triggered
Emotions are not programmed, universal reactions triggered in the brain, but simulations constructed in the moment.
02
Valence & Arousal Scale
The foundation of emotion is affect: a continuous sense of valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity) arising from interoception.
03
Emotional Granularity
Richer emotional vocabulary means more distinct emotional experiences. You can only feel what you have words for.
CHALLENGES
Privacy and clinical responsibility at the core.
PRISMap uses BCI and wearable data to capture emotional experience passively; no input required. All data is stored locally, only the user's side is captured, and the app never suggests solutions or interprets. This ensures reflection belongs to the user and their therapist.
REFLECTIONS
Tradeoffs for security.
The product can't solve every aspect of the problem; some tradeoffs are necessary.
Designing for the future.
Designing for things that don't exist yet means designing everything with intent!