Raven: Immortalize Everything

Product Ecosystem

Brain chip. Eyes. Ears. Hands. Raven.

Raven is a neural-augmentation device that is consensually inserted into participants' brains to record every single moment of their lives. The digital-biological integration allows the user to navigate the interface by moving their pinky over their thumb.

The Digital Interface

A lot happens in a day. What kind of sorting system can organize such huge amounts of data?

Raven has two distinct modes: Record and Sort. In the day-to-day, Raven defaults to Record. Then, all manipulation of recorded content occurs in Sort. The various functions within each mode live in a vertical stack, allowing the user to swipe up and down to access them.

The sorting interface's landing page, launched by the command, "Hey Raven", is a map that highlights the path taken by the user during their entire day. The user may pick through their Bookmarked Moments of the day to view details and sort them into custom folders.

Once sorted, the data becomes accessible through the Library, which organizes the moments by custom folders, people, locations, and date. Folders and individual moments can be shared with other people who are also registered with Raven.

The Analytics page then provides breakdowns of the user's activity, identifying the places, people, and moments that they interact with most often. This feature is part of Raven’s automated analytics system, which collects empirical data about the user’s life to eliminate the need for reflective thinking.

Analytics offers customizable time periods as well as a Lifetime view, which includes two additional metrics: the percentage of the user’s life documented by Raven and their engagement compared to all Raven users. These percentage-based stats are designed to motivate continued usage.

Contextual Environmental Adaptation

Incognito Mode

In cases which require confidentiality, moments recorded in Incognito Mode still appear in the Library but are not shareable with others. The color red appears exclusively in Incognito to signal an altered state and to ensure that the user will not forget to turn it off.

The Question of Privacy

To attract customers, we needed a value proposition so enticing that people would be willing to sacrifice their rights to their personal lives just to access it.

We anticipated our entry point into the consumer market to be white-collar professionals in corporate environments, as Raven is inherently a response to the capitalist demands of society. With even small-scale adoption, we saw potential for rapid major adoption because of the competitive advantage it provides to its user. Of course, this is dystopian thinking—so with heavy emphasis on the speculative and experimental nature of the project we hoped to undertake, we came up with...

The Value Proposition

What if you had the power to remember everything?

Our Experimental Goals

We took particular interest in the invisibility/hypervisibility of surveillance, the allure of privacy, and the ethics of new tech.

The real-time user feedback we received while pitching and user-testing was overwhelmingly concerned with the discomfort of always being recorded by others. We chose to lean into this phenomenon as a central theme.

While traditional surveillance has been largely invisible to the public, Raven's live-recording capabilities make this process hypervisible. This shift raises questions about ethics and privacy: What happens when large-scale, impersonal government monitoring becomes personal? When individuals, instead of being passive subjects of surveillance, become the active curators of their own data? What are the psychological and societal implications of knowing that every moment of your life is being recorded and analyzed by a system designed to optimize and "perfect" your experience?

A Speculative Future

In a world where advanced search engines and digital assistants dominate daily life...

With the rise of the digital age, humans have begun to externalize our cognitive memory through photos, videos, and auto-generated metadata—a practice which helps us recall the things that we've done and the way they made us feel without engaging in the practice of reflection and retelling that has historically upheld memory retention. While we capture moments from our lives more than ever, these moments function more as data points to help describe our lives rather than the result of a conscious effort to cherish our lived experiences. This externalization of memory is our first point of interest.

Our second point of interest is that humans are built to optimize—and if we are able to Google the answer to something in a matter of seconds, then there is no reason for our brains to ever commit that answer to memory. My partner and I drew from findings that the Internet has negatively altered humans' attentional capacities, memory processes, and social cognition to examine how digital tools shape the way we perceive, process, and preserve our experiences.

Product Strategy

Revolutionizing cognitive health & societal productivity by enhancing memory retention, providing personal insight, and enabling advanced research

Market Strategy

Corporate → commonplace

Development Framework

Demonstrating responsible innovation

...is crucial! While the speculative nature of this product allowed us the creative liberty to push the capabilities of tech beyond our own levels of comfort as an academic exercise, here are the safeguards we would have put in place to ensure that Raven is ethical, inclusive, and accountable.

The Map

Balancing data, input fields, and accessibility on the landing interface

We initially envisioned two entry points to each Bookmarked Moment: one through tapping to view its details, and another through a quick-action haptic touch.

But as we started wireframing, the two became redundant, as they both led to the main call-to-action of sorting. So we revised. This is the simplified flow we designed for:

Despite the possibilities offered by an XR/MR interface, which supports dynamic screen sizes and non-rectangular shapes, we chose to constrain the design to a singular, rectangular interface to mitigate dizziness and confusion (and to MAYA principle our way past the more radical parts of our design).

We also decided early on to base the sorting interface around a map of the user's journey from the day because it was the easiest way to accessibly visualize an entire day's worth of time. The user is more likely to remember moments from their day based on location than any other metric. A map allows them to pick a location from any time without digging through tables of data, all while giving them a rapid overview of their daily physical journey at a single glance.

As we iterated, we played around with various ways to transition from a macro to micro view of the same information.

The Map • Usability Test #1

The Map • Final Iteration

The Library

Familiar patterns trump complex "unique" setups. At least when it comes to this much data.

The challenge of the Library was to make all the moments from an entire lifetime feel navigable. While we set out with the intention of creating a more novel and elaborate interface...

...we ultimately decided to stick with a more familiar format for large visual databases. Photo albums and grids for the win! It would be easier for new users to adopt our product if they already knew how to navigate it, and we didn't want to overwhelm them with new UX patterns while also flooding the screen with all that recorded content.

Albums = personalization = familiarity = navigability!

Analytics

Glanceable data viz using the same design language

The goal for Analytics was to feel more like a helpful and customizable tool for gathering insight on one's life rather than an expediter of Raven's foremost consequence, which is the reduction of one's capacity for self reflection and the objectification of the subjectivity of memory. Ha! Through the iterative machine we went.

We achieved the feelings of distillation and control through the Customizable (default: Weekly) View and Lifetime View. The final screens further prioritized reduction: large, digestible numbers paired with graphs that could convey meaning through their visual appearance alone.

I owe a lot to the evenings spent frying my brain cells over this project. Above all, I cherished the opportunity to engage in the discourse surrounding data collection and technology's role in human life, which felt particularly exciting as I watched wearables and AI-integration technology advance throughout the making of Raven. And of course, I cherish my project partner-turned-friend, whose shared concern for logical consistency and purposeful design matches my greedy appetite to get things right.

Thanks for reading!