What if technology understood the moment you were in—and helped you share it, instead of pulling you away?
Explore the experiences ↓Our devices are getting better at understanding us individually. But many of our favorite experiences happen together: choosing a movie, listening to music, cheering for a team, or visiting a new place.
This concept asks whether a minimal wearable could make technology more responsive to shared context—with less screen time and far more user control.
Five places where private preferences could become better shared experiences.
When household members opt into a shared session, their devices could find the overlap between individual tastes and suggest films and shows everyone might enjoy.
An event could offer an opt-in experience around the artist: discover familiar songs, share a post-show playlist, or find friends who chose to reveal they're attending.
With patron consent, a venue could see aggregated interest in upcoming games and offer a choice of broadcasts by zone or screen.
Compatible equipment could recognize a deliberately initiated session and restore preferred accessibility, workout, and media settings.
Opt-in arrival notifications, discreet check-ins and simple haptic prompts could make staying connected easier without always reaching for a screen.
Rather than expose anyone's taste profile, a shared session could calculate recommendations based on the group's common ground.
Each participant chooses whether to join. Nobody's individual history is displayed to the group.
Nearby compatible devices or venues announce supported experiences. Proximity alone never grants access to personal data.
People explicitly join a temporary session and choose which types of preferences can contribute.
A trusted device or privacy-preserving service computes group recommendations without revealing individual profiles.
Sessions end, permissions expire, and the venue retains no personal listening or viewing histories.
Potential enabling technologies include Bluetooth Low Energy, Ultra Wideband for compatible devices, on-device processing, and existing ecosystem APIs. Hardware integration and permissions would require platform support; these capabilities are proposed, not available Ring features.
Opt-in by design. Presence must not silently imply permission. No invisible audience profiling.
Designed for everyone. Accessibility, child safety, temporary venue sessions and sensible defaults are core requirements—not afterthoughts.
Calm technology. A subtle haptic or timely suggestion should replace an interruption, not create another one.
Build a simulated shared recommendation session on the web, with invented preference profiles and consent controls.
Explore explicit pairing, local proximity cues, and lightweight haptics using supported developer APIs.
Evaluate battery, form factor, secure identity, sensing limits, and real-world accessibility before considering custom hardware.
This project began as handwritten notes about music, shared spaces, family, and connection. The form factor is a ring. The ambition is something much bigger.
← Back to all workIndependent speculative design by Sam Dornan. Not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Apple. Apple names identify potential integration scenarios only.