PRISM

Inspiration For neurodivergent individuals and people with social anxiety, every conversation leaves behind a fog of uncertainty. We were inspired by a simple truth: these users don't lack social intelligence — they lack social feedback. Nobody had ever given them a real mirror. What it does Prism uses smart glasses to record real interactions, then disaggregates the conversation into readable social signals — tone, timing, expression, reciprocity — through a companion app. Users receive a plain-language interaction brief, annotated playback, and a personalized quiz built from their actual conversations to build genuine social literacy over time. How we built it We built Prism around one core metaphor: a prism doesn't create anything new, it reveals what was already there. That idea drove every decision — from the glasses as the physical capture instrument, to the app's spectrum-banded playback timeline, to the quiz that grounds learning in real interactions rather than abstract social scenarios. Challenges we ran into Designing for vulnerability was harder than any technical problem. Our users are examining something deeply personal. Every design decision had to balance honest feedback with emotional safety, and genuine insight with the risk of amplifying the anxiety we were trying to reduce. Accomplishments that we're proud of We're proud of reframing neurodivergence entirely — not as a deficit to fix, but as a signal-reading gap to close. That distinction shaped a product that feels supportive rather than corrective, which we believe is rare in this space. What we learned We learned that the sense we were designing for — social exteroception — is scientifically real and deeply trainable. Researching interpersonal attunement and theory of mind completely changed how we understood the problem, and pushed us toward a much more considered, evidence-grounded design. What's next for PRISM Expanding the real-time haptic feedback layer, developing a clinician-facing dashboard for therapeutic use, and building out group interaction modes for school and workplace settings — making Prism not just a personal tool, but a shared one.

Built With

• figma