Etherpear

Overview

Etherpear is a speculative smart mirror that promises to make you perfect and quietly bills you in identity. It was my first project on the MSc — a solo brief where three unrelated future trends were drawn at random and had to be fused into one coherent artefact. The product name is an anagram of the reaper: the mirror that sells you a better body is also the thing that ends you.

This is critical design, not a product proposal. It is meant to provoke a question, not ship. I’ve written it up that way on purpose — the value here is conceptual synthesis and interaction craft, not usability metrics.

The brief: three trends, drawn at random

The starting point was Board of Innovation’s Future Scan, a wheel of 150+ speculative trends. I didn’t get to pick a theme I liked. Three numbers were assigned at random, and the challenge was to make them cohere:

• #131 — Shop for body parts. Dystopian narratives around the illegal trade of body parts, and the social and ethical fallout of extreme aesthetic consumption.
• #122 — Non-medical reset of the brain. Altering emotional and behavioural states without medical intervention — and what that does to identity and control.
• #119 — Personal happiness barometer. Devices that measure and nudge subjective well-being, and the problem of quantifying happiness at all.

The interesting constraint isn’t any single trend — it’s that they don’t obviously belong together. The actual design problem was synthesis under a random brief: find the one dystopia where buying body parts, resetting the brain, and metering happiness are the same gesture.

The through-line I landed on: a world where perfection is purchasable, and the currency is the self. Every enhancement you buy is paid for with a fragment of your emotional depth and memory. The happiness barometer is what keeps you buying; the brain reset is what stops you noticing what you’ve lost.

Research: locating the piece in speculative design

Because the subject is provocative, the research exists to prove the provocation is deliberate — that it sits in a lineage, not in shock value.

Speculative & critical design.

• Dunne & Raby, Speculative Everything — the frame for the whole project: design as a way to imagine products that caricature present-day problems and force reflection on their consequences.
• Victimless Leather (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr) — lab-grown living tissue that interrogates the ethics of biotechnology and where the limits of manipulating life sit.
• Third Ear (Stelarc) — a prosthetic ear surgically implanted and wired to the internet; the body as obsolete hardware to be extended. Direct precedent for a device that treats the body as upgradable.

Fiction that models the cost.

• Blade Runner — replicants chasing perfection and humanity, and losing their essence in the process.
• Gattaca — genetic perfection pursued so obsessively it dehumanises.
• Frankenstein — life assembled from dead parts, and the existential estrangement that follows radical bodily change.
• [Cyberpunk novel — confirm title] — human/technology fusion through cybernetic body modification and its effect on identity.

The real-world anchor.

• Organ trafficking. The dystopia isn’t invented from nothing — it’s an extrapolation of an existing market where human vulnerability is already commodified. This is the line that keeps the piece from reading as fantasy: it’s a near future.

Design: from Smart Mirror to Etherpear

The artefact evolved across phases, and I’ve kept that visible because the iteration is part of the story. It began as a generic Smart Mirror — a daily-use mirror with a hidden, illicit marketplace layered underneath the weather and reminders. By the final phase it had become Etherpear: a named product with its own brand, aesthetic, and antagonist.

The narrative

A single character, John, carries the concept. In a future where smart mirrors run daily life, John is targeted by a corporation that reads and amplifies his insecurities. The mirror offers perfection through body modification — and every change quietly takes a fragment of his memory and identity. The narrative is the payload; the interface is how it’s delivered.

The interface

The mirror runs on a gesture language designed for a screen you stand in front of, not one you hold. Tap to select and open; press-and-hold for more options; pinch-and-drag to move things; pinch-hold-and-rotate to turn them; raise two fingers onto a body part to select it and preview an “upgrade”; open fist to dismiss the interface. The dark, neon-accented aesthetic and the enigmatic copy (“perfection comes at a cost”) are doing narrative work, not just decoration.

Interaction design frameworks applied

To keep a speculative object grounded in method, I ran it through standard IxD lenses rather than designing on vibes alone:

• UX Honeycomb (Morville) — worked the concept against all seven facets (useful, usable, findable, credible, desirable, accessible, valuable), including the uncomfortable ones: a desirable interface for an undesirable transaction.
• Five dimensions of interaction design (Crampton Smith & Silver) — words, visual representations, physical objects/space, time, behaviour — mapped onto a device you inhabit rather than hold.
• Interaction devices — biometrics, gesture, weight and haptic sensors, AR, facial/body recognition, eye tracking, voice — scoped as the sensing stack a mirror like this would need.

The payoff: reading Etherpear

The name is the argument. Etherpear is an anagram of the reaper. The sleek, pear-shaped mirror that sells you a more perfect body is, letter for letter, death — and the reveal is designed to land late, the way the cost lands late on John. Once you see it, you can’t unsee what the object is.

How to judge this piece: not by task-completion rates or a SUS score — it was never tested with users, and it isn’t meant to be usable in the ordinary sense. A critical-design object succeeds if it makes the trade-off felt: that the pursuit of aesthetic perfection, frictionless and beautifully designed, can quietly cost identity. Etherpear does that by making the interface seductive on purpose — the polish is the trap.

Learnings

This was my first MSc project, and I’d frame its rigour honestly. The conceptual and research rigour is real — the piece is properly located in speculative design theory and anchored to a real market. The empirical rigour isn’t there: no validation, no user testing, and the usability frameworks were applied analytically rather than verified. That’s normal for a first speculative brief, and I’d rather say so than dress it up.

What it taught me that carries forward:

• Synthesis under constraint. Turning three unrelated, randomly assigned trends into one coherent world is a harder and more transferable skill than designing around a theme I’d have chosen.
• Concept as the core deliverable. The anagram, the narrative, and the “seductive interface as trap” idea are the design — the screens serve them.
• Applying formal IxD lenses to an unconventional object, and being willing to sit with the awkward answers they produce.

Where it sits in my work: Etherpear is my range piece. My other case studies carry the evidence — Wizard-of-Oz studies, SUS, statistical testing. This one carries the critical thinking: proof I can take a difficult, ambiguous brief and make something that provokes rather than merely functions.