Hallowed Mind EraDystopia · 2125
Fifty years after Open Mind, emotional visibility has become mandatory. Hallowed Mind Era uses propaganda, packaging and competing films to explore a fictional 2125 where care depends on being readable and privacy carries a cost.
- Problem
- A system built around care becomes a means of control when participation is compulsory.
- Role
- I contributed futures and visual design within a group project.
- Evidence
- Futures mapping and ethical prompts traced systemic drift, exclusion and competing actors.
- Outcome
- Two films, communication artefacts, a pictorial and futures canvases make the fictional conflict tangible.
When care becomes conditional on data.
What happens when support depends on being readable, and wanting privacy is treated as a threat?
Fifty years after Open Mind, the technology still works but its meaning has changed. Emotional visibility is essential infrastructure, and the Mood Beacon can justify interventions and restrictions. People perform acceptable emotions to avoid attention. The Undetected, whose distress does not match the signals, can remain unsupported even while surrounded by monitoring.
Our group made that drift concrete through actors and artefacts. The Civic Empathy Authority presents surveillance as stability and care. The NullPatch Network illegally interrupts visibility; Controllers exploit hidden spaces for coercion and blackmail. Warning signs, packaging, a fictional consent form and propaganda turn those conflicting positions into a world readers can navigate.
NullPatch is deliberately imperfect. Block Mode offers temporary privacy for grief, arguments, art or quiet, while hidden spaces can also enable exploitation. Sever Mode attempts permanent escape, with fictional failures producing the Hollowed and more state propaganda. Those consequences ask whether people can choose care on their own terms when every route out carries a cost.
Tracing the system, then designing its consequences.
Futures methods and ethical questions guided the world’s actors, failure states and artefacts. The aim was a believable critique rather than a proposed technical solution.
Map the slow drift, not a sudden collapse
The Actionable Futures Toolkit helped us map care becoming normal, then mandatory, then a measure of who deserves support. A fictional timeline from 2075 to 2125 explains that accumulation. The same MindChip and Mood Beacon remain in place while power, expectations and the ability to opt out change.
Pressure-test power and exclusion
Ethical Explorer cards examined surveillance, data control, exclusion, algorithmic bias and other risks. These questions shaped specific world mechanics: the Undetected expose what measurement misses; the Authority controls the risk narrative; Controllers show how resources and access can turn private spaces into leverage.
Design from opposing viewpoints
Public propaganda promises protection, while NullPatch materials promise moments of autonomy. Packaging, signage and the Sever consent form make each side’s claims tangible. The films let viewers encounter both languages, asking how a persuasive interface can conceal consequences even when its visual communication is clear.
Keep the harm and the human need visible
The creepy-technology lens helped us explore why a helpful-looking system can feel intrusive. Small scenes—an interrupted argument, a private song, a moment of grief—make the need for privacy ordinary. NullPatch’s risks keep the outcome critical: interrupting surveillance does not remove the structures that produced it.
Two voices from the same controlled world.
The paired worlds, authority poster and NullPatch packaging show how the system communicates care and control. Two films present opposing voices; their technologies and effects are fictional narrative devices.
Hallowed Mind propaganda film
The Civic Empathy Authority’s public language frames emotional visibility as protection, showing how control can be presented through reassuring communication.
NullPatch resistance film
The counter-story explores privacy, relief and the risks of trying to become unreadable inside a system that expects constant visibility.
A warning about consent, drawn through everyday life.
Hallowed Mind Era follows the consequences of the same system through authority, resistance and everyday life. Its films, artefacts and futures documentation make consent and recognition the central questions, rather than presenting NullPatch as a technical answer.
A functioning system can still exclude
The Undetected show how monitoring can miss the experience it claims to support. The story shifts attention from whether the technology works to who sets its measures, whose needs count and what happens when someone cannot or will not comply.
Make resistance complicated
Block Mode gives ordinary privacy a place in the narrative; Controllers and Sever’s fictional failures expose its risks. Interrupting surveillance does not remove the surrounding power structure. The group project remains design fiction, rather than a forecast, a medical claim or a functioning privacy product.
The complete scenario, actors, timeline, artefacts and ethical analysis behind the films.
The completed project canvases documenting system actors, motivations, risks and future directions.