Milestone in the Making
This week marked a significant milestone as I was shortlisted for the
2026 Global Design Initiative
after being selected by lecturers to submit a critical essay on "New Paradigms in Design and
The Future Roles of Designers". Following this, I attended an
interview with our school's
Dean, Nur
to share with her my current Graduation Project progress.
The interview provided an opportunity to articulate my research interests, how my project is
going, while reflecting how I can further improve or explore it. I received valuable,
insightful, and encouraging feedback from
Dean, Nur.
Crafting P-6
Taking Andreas' feedback seriously from last week, I did a deliberate uncomfortable reflection on how my attention is shaped, fragmented, and quietly harvested in environments of extreme media saturation. I tried to focus on what kind of small interactions I make on social media apps and I settled down on the action of "clicking". The small, repetitive clicks felt instinctive, almost meaningless.
A lot of content now adays create memes and they thrive in rapid circulation. They are instantly recognisable, emotionally efficient, and endlessly replaceable. Memes demand very little from us cognitively, yet they are highly effective at capturing attention and prompting interaction.
How can I make visible an interaction that is habitual?
Prototype 5: World of Brainrot
Shifting the focus away from large, dramatic gestures, World of Brainrot operates through a single micro-interaction action: clicking. The intention is to make the user pause and ask a deceptively simple question: why am I still clicking?
It is an interactive webpage where users are to repeatedly select content they recognise or feel drawn to. At first, the experience feels playful, but beneath the surface, the system is constantly recording behaviour: what is clicked, how often, and in what patterns. As they are feeding the system with their interactions, these data are being translated into an identity portrait of themselves. It is a constructed version of the user that emerge not from who they claim to be, but from all the content they clicked on and engaged with.
By centring the experience around memes, World of Brainrot mirrors the way users consume large volumes of digital content quickly, often without reflection or lasting value. The work questions what happens when interaction becomes habitual rather than meaningful.
Ultimately, World of Brainrot functions as narrative about quiet participation. It reveals how seemingly trival actions like clicking are woven into larger systems that define who we are through data. By making this process visible, it invites users to reflection on how easily identity can be formed through their patterns of behaviour, and how often we surrender agency without even noticing.
Read more about the algorithmic process breakdown in Prototype 5's Catalogue of Making.
Try Prototype 5 Catalogue of Making (Prototype 5)
I curated a small "database" of familiar meme images and short viral meme clips by actively scouring online spaces where brainrot content spreads fastest. The memes are used as a raw material of digital attention, low-effort to consume, and designed to trigger quick clicks. To echo the logic of apps and gaming interfaces, I built a HUD-style onboarding screen where users are asked to input their particulars, framing the experience as a system that "needs" data before it begins.
Once it starts, every click triggers a new state. The interface multiples, splits, and floods the screen with more randomised meme content. The interaction escalates quickly, simulating how platforms reward engagement with constant novelty and volume. As the user keeps clicking, the system quietly collects what they choose and then recomposes these into an identity portrait. The final output turns mindless consumption into visible inference: an "algorithmic identity" of the user built from nothing but the content they couldn't stop interacting with.
The interaction is intentionally static and irreversible: nothing changes unless the user acts, and once recorded, actions cannot be undone. Typing becomes a proxy for behavioural data, where longer inputs generate stronger system responses. Randomised placement of effects highlights the opacity of how data is processed.
Over time, the identity becomes increasingly marked and system-defined. It becomes more recognisable to the human eye. This tensions mirrors how data-driven systems turn our everyday interactions into lasting computational traces.
Visual Archive
Challenges Faced
In the earlier version of this experiment, my main challenge was the system's behaviour which felt too arbitrary and aesthetic-led. The portrat was generated by detecting "white areas" in the image mask, then stamping random ASCII characters onto those regions. While it produced a visually satisfying effect, the logiv became too surface-level. The system wasn't clearly translating the idea of datafication. The stamping was randomised and it was heavily dependent on threshold settings so the outcome was hard to "sell" beyond the visual.
I also struggled with control and clarity. Small parameter changes (threshold, strength, character size, spacing) could dramatically alter the image which made the portrait too dark, too sparse, or inconsistent. The interaction also overlapped behaviour. intensify() was triggered constantly, which made the system feel like it was always reacting but not necessarily with intention.
These challenges pushed me to redesign toward a more deliberate trigger so that accumulation reads as system inscription rather than visual chaos.
Dean Nur's Feedback
The feedback received from the Dean affirmed that Prototype 5: World of Brainrot is a strong and relevant starting point, particularly in its use of viral content to reflect the realism of contemporary digital behaviour. The interactive flow successfully mirrors how people actually engage with media, making the experience feel familiar rather than staged. However, the work needs to move beyond recognition and novelty towards deeper reflection and consequence.
➀ Grounded Meaningful Data
Rather than abstract clicks, the experience could begin with more relatable entry points such as food, culture, politics etc. using curated datasets (e.g. top trending foods or dominant political narratives) to help audience see themselves more clearly in the system. Using real or semi-real data would allow users to react emotionally and critically to their own patterns, rather than treating the interaction as playful noise.
➁ Exhibition Context and Scale
The feedback also challenged me to think more deliberately about exhibition context and scale. The work should not feel niche or self-contained, but capable of aggregating individual interactions into a larger portrait of collective behaviour. This opens up questions of how personal data becomes cultural data, and how shared habits shape algorithmic norms.
➂ Emotion: Guilt
Emotionally, the dean pointed towards guilt as a powerful but underexplored affect. Doomscrolling is not just passive consumption. It often carries a quiet sense of discomfort, addiction, and self-awareness. Rather than explicitly naming addiction, the work could surface guilt through subtle prompts, emotional questions, and reflective moments such as revealing hours spent, repetitive choices, or emotional dependencies. Researching how artists provoke emotional response through sound, staging, or pacing could help deepen this affective layer.
Overall, the feedback pushes the project to evolve from a simulation of brainrot into a reflective system: one that makes users confront their consumption habits, question their agency, and consider whether awareness might lead to behavioural change.
Group Feedback
The feedback made me reflect on how the experience could feel more open and intuitive, particularly at the start. There was a clear preference for allowing users to interact freely rather than guiding them through structured steps or form-filling, which helped me realise that my entry point may be too restrictive. Andreas personally did not like the idea of having to fill in the form, and that the bootLog starting screen was redundant. I was prompted to form a coherent narrative. While the project was described as ambitious, I was encouraged to move forward with the current plan, test it with real users, and improve it through feedback rather than over-refining it in theory.
What stood out most was the emphasis on the experiential quality of work, bringing audiences along a journey through interaction, especially the moment where the system reacts in engaging ways to familiar content like memes. I was also reminded that the outcomes do not need to be limited to an exhibition alone, but could extend into publications or a website, and that exploring physical forms such as 3D renders or printed models may help make the work more tangible.