Cambridge, MA, U.S.
A Speculative Design Probe of AI-Mediated Dream Sensing and Interpretation Technologies
10.2025 - 12.2025
(Publication in Progress)
Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
ADV 9672: Proseminar in MEDIUMS: On Making Culture, Technology, and Art
Collaborator:
Lilith Yu
Instructor:
Allen Sayegh
# Dream Technology
# Speculative Design
# Design Probing
# Design Fiction
# Web Design
# Prototyping
# Experience Design
Project Description
AI-mediated dream sensing and interpretation technologies are increasingly discussed in HCI as a plausible next frontier of dream engineering and intimate computing. Morrow Pillow is a speculative artifact ecology that imagines a near-future consumer system that claims to sense, replay, and interpret dreams, and to generate psychoanalytic identity reports from the unconscious. Through a constellation of fictional news stories, leaked corporate materials, influencer posts, and social media ephemera, the project examines what happens when the unconscious becomes a site of data extraction and algorithmic interpretation. By charting the pillow’s cultural fallout across public discourse and everyday life, it asks how intimate technologies can shape belief, identity, and the stories people tell about themselves.
Grounded in Research-through-Design and design fiction, the project stages an encounter centered on a physical pillow prototype and an accompanying media ecosystem to understand how people make sense of such systems before they become ordinary technologies. It synthesizes recurring tensions around interpretive authority, consent and revocation, and refusal practices. It contributes the concept of adversarial intimacy and design implications for building dream interpretation interfaces that remain contestable and practically refusable in intimate settings.
Exhibition