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Oryn

Speculative Design

YEAR

2026

TIMELINE

83 Hours

FigBuild

SCOPE

Speculative Design

Product Concept

Research

Branding

Prototyping

TOOLS

Figma

Figma Make

Flora AI

Gemini

Kling AI

Overview

Oryn is a speculative neurotech product that makes your mental state visible in real time, calibrated entirely to the user.

Built as part of the FigBuild Hackathon with a team of four MPS Communication Design students at Parsons, Oryn is an AR heads-up display paired with a biocompatible neural sensor. It monitors four dimensions of mental state, including focus, memory, self-control, and stress, and displays them as live data overlaid on the world around you.

Context

The prompt my team and I were grounded in: physical health had its revolution. Heart rate, sleep stages, blood oxygen are data that once lived only in hospital equipment but now easily sits on your wrist. However, we questioned why mental health had not yet had the same moment.

Problem

After auditing the mental health tool landscape that exists today, from mood trackers, sleep apps, weekly therapy to wellness advice, one pattern was clear. Every existing tool is built around what comes out of your brain, but not what causes it. They treat symptoms, and not signals.

By the time you recognize a pattern, like burnout, an anxiety spiral, or a week of low focus, you're already inside it. There's no visibility into the why. No data. No baseline. No way to intervene before the cycle is too far gone.

The gap between what your brain is doing and what you can consciously act on is where the gap is currently.

What would it feel like if your mental state had data the way your body already does?

Research

Oryn's design is grounded in four neurotransmitters that continuously shape your mental experience and four brain regions where their activity is most legible.

Glutamate

The brain's primary excitatory signal. It drives the intensity of thought, learning, and memory formation. When it's active, connections are being built.

GABA

The brain's inhibitory force. It filters noise, creates order, and determines whether you can focus or recover from stress.

Dopamine

Governs motivation and reward, but not the satisfaction kind. It drives the wanting, the anticipation, the reach towards what's next.

Norepinephrine

The alert system. It sharpens attention under pressure and signals when stress has crossed from useful into harmful.

Glutamate

The brain's primary excitatory signal. It drives the intensity of thought, learning, and memory formation. When it's active, connections are being built.

GABA

The brain's inhibitory force. It filters noise, creates order, and determines whether you can focus or recover from stress.

Dopamine

Governs motivation and reward, but not the satisfaction kind. It drives the wanting, the anticipation, the reach towards what's next.

Norepinephrine

The alert system. It sharpens attention under pressure and signals when stress has crossed from useful into harmful.

Glutamate

The brain's primary excitatory signal. It drives the intensity of thought, learning, and memory formation. When it's active, connections are being built.

GABA

The brain's inhibitory force. It filters noise, creates order, and determines whether you can focus or recover from stress.

Dopamine

Governs motivation and reward, but not the satisfaction kind. It drives the wanting, the anticipation, the reach toward what's next.

Norepinephrine

The alert system. It sharpens attention under pressure and signals when stress has crossed from useful into harmful.

Prefrontal Cortex

Cognitive Clarity

The prefrontal cortex is where intention becomes execution. Glutamate powers the sharpness of logical reasoning. GABA sets the signal-to-noise ratio. Dopamine keeps motivation in the zone where work feels meaningful. Norepinephrine flags when stress has crossed into cognitive locking. Mushroom Spine Density reflects how much of your mastery has become instinct.

Hippocampus

Knowledge Consolidation

Learning is physical. Glutamate fuels Long-Term Potentiation, or the molecular event that actually builds a memory. GABA creates the conditions for that process to happen in order. Mushroom Spine Density is the evidence, where a Thin Spine solidifies into something permanent.

Prefrontal Cortex

Cognitive Clarity

Hippocampus

Knowledge Consolidation

Nucleus Accumbens

Incentive Health

Not all motivation feels the same, and Oryn is designed to know the difference. Dopamine tracks the wanting. GABA is the brake, or your capacity to pause and choose. Endorphins mark real achievement, not just consumption. Mushroom Spine Density here is a fixation signal. The denser the pattern, the more automatic the pull has become.

Amygdala

Social & Stress Authenticity

The amygdala reacts first and recalibrates later, or doesn't. Norepinephrine captures the moment of activation. Glutamate drives the intensity of that response. GABA determines what happens next: whether you recover, or whether the stress accumulates into something your nervous system starts to treat as normal. Not all stress is a problem; stress that never resolves is.

Nucleus Accumbens

Incentive Health

Amygdala

Social & Stress Authenticity

Design Decisions

Real-Time Dashboard

The dashboard overlays live readouts of all four dimensions directly into the user's field of view. Each brain region lights up relative to the user's personal baseline, not a population average. You're always being compared to yourself.

History & Long-Term Tracking

For returning users, the History view goes further, showing current neural patterns against their highest-performance windows. This is your brain compared to itself, at its best. The comparison that actually means something.

Resonate with People

Users share a simplified, human-readable signal of their mental state: Focus, Self Control, Stress. An important signal, with the people they choose to share it with.

Resonate with Items

Oryn detects neural fluctuations around everyday objects and triggers contextual responses to support psychological equilibrium. For example, your lamp dims or your diffuser activates. The environment responds before you have to ask it to.

EEG ID

Every Oryn user receives a unique EEG ID, which is the personal identifier that gates access to Resonate. Neural data only flows between explicitly consented connections. The user decide who sees in.

User Cases

Jeremiah

Age 21

Biology Student

Struggling to focus and misattributing it to lack of ability. Oryn reveals he's studying during the exact hours his data shows he performs worst. He restructures his schedule. Consolidation improves within three weeks.

Sam

Age 32

Product Designer

Has lived with OCD since childhood. By the time she recognizes the cycle, she's already too far in. Oryn identifies a 90-second intervention window. The loop loses its automatic reflex. OCD becomes something she can observe as external to herself.

Tom

Age 17

High School Student

Quietly struggling with suicidal thoughts, not expressing them to his family. Oryn detects a 4-day threat-response build matching his pre-crisis signature and signals his Resonate contacts. The data finds his family before he has to verbalize it.

User Cases

Jeremiah

Age 21

Biology Student

Sam

Age 32

Product Designer

Tom

Age 17

High School Student

Reflection

Oryn is speculative, which gave my team both freedom and responsibility. Freedom to ask what mental health tools could be if they started from the brain's actual signals. Responsibility to make sure that vision didn't collapse into something too dystopian.

What we were really asking, across the whole project: when one feels mentally off, they deserve to know why! The patterns running your behaviors, moods, recovery, and learning, they're all yours. You deserve to be empowered with the exact information that can help you take full control of your life.

Team Members

MPS Communication Design

Parsons School of Design, The New School

Riya Shrestha

Cason Huang

Katie Lu

View Project

DevPost ↗

Video ↗

What's Next

If we had more time, the first priority would have been user testing. Our user cases were carefully reasoned but still hypothetical and not lived feedback. The question we never got to answer in the room was: does seeing your stress at 68% in real time feel empowering, or does it just add another thing to monitor?

The second thing I'd revisit is onboarding. The moment a user sees their own neural data for the first time is where trust is either built or broken. Within 83 hours, that moment didn't get the attention it properly deserved.

Interested in hearing more?

I'd love to chat about my process.

Feel free to reach out at sophbaedesign@gmail.com

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