.png)
A ring that helps connection see past bias.
A speculative neurotech ring, designed for Ben & Jerry's, that blends the brand's activism with inclusive design to confront cultural discrimination in dating and everyday interaction, turning a deepening bond into something you can see and hold.
How might a brand influence young people to build more multicultural, welcoming communities? We were asked to reposition Ben & Jerry's a decade ahead and design a future product family around fighting discrimination.
I focused the theme down to bias in dating and everyday interaction, then designed a speculative neurotech ring that reads compatibility, and physically reveals and interlocks as a bond grows, making an invisible connection visible.
"Cultural and ethnic diversity are still not fully welcome within communities, so how can we influence the youth to foster multicultural community development?"
As populations grow and migration rises, so does racial, ethnic and religious discrimination. The UK alone is projected to add around 5.5 million people over the next decade and a half. We chose to meet that future early, designing for adolescents aged 6 to 22, the generation who will shape what "welcome" means.
We segmented adolescence into four playful, Ben & Jerry's-flavoured archetypes, each at a different point in how they see difference, and discrimination.
Mirrors the world around them. Doesn't yet register ethnicity or origin, or the harm of discrimination.
Peer-led and quick to absorb. Beginning to grasp right from wrong and to care about others.
Defined by their circle. Reasoning their own moral choices and forming deeper connections.
Idealistic and empathetic. Building relationships on shared values, and questioning the world.
Ben & Jerry's isn't a neutral brand. It openly works to "advance human rights and dignity" and back social and economic justice for marginalised groups, with purpose-driven launches like Justice ReMix'd. That activism made it the perfect vehicle to carry a heavier message inside something joyful.
Our design strategy vision: turn every scoop and digital touchpoint into a catalyst for empathy, education and community action against hate.
Scan a tub to unlock real personal stories, statistics and education about cultural discrimination, building empathy right from the freezer.
An app and forum as a safe space: join anti-hate campaigns, access educational tools, report incidents and find support, turning passive consumers into an active community.
A transparent, tamper-proof record for verified stories and traceable giving, so the community can trust exactly where its support goes.
From the meta-theme of cultural discrimination, I zoomed into one charged, everyday space: dating and interaction. Bias shows up sharply the moment people try to form a bond of any kind, with race, ethnicity, nationality or religion used to judge or exclude.
Research shows people from marginalised backgrounds report cultural prejudice more often on dating platforms and in everyday interaction. The cost is real: lower self-worth, higher anxiety, and lasting barriers to forming trusting, authentic connections.
What if a connection could be made visible, so two people focused on how they actually fit, not on where the other is from?
A speculative neurotech ring that supports dating and interaction by reading compatibility, then expresses a growing bond as a physical, shared object. It pairs advanced neurotech with inclusive, culturally sensitive design, and a healthy dose of Ben & Jerry's playfulness.
On a date, or any new interaction, the ring sends a soft pulse to the brain. AI reads historical data to forecast compatibility, hinting at where this could go.
The ring passes its reading to your device, so you can reflect on the connection's real strengths and weaknesses, beyond first impressions.
If you keep seeing each other, the two rings begin to act as one, a quiet signal that something is forming.
As the relationship grows, carved swirls uncover piece by piece, each shared moment adding detail to the ring.
Drawn by magnets, the rings finally meet and lock into one complete form, a single object holding the whole journey of two people choosing each other.
I worked the form out by hand first, building sketch models to test shape, fit and feel, then moved into CAD to finalise the detail and prep it as a believable product. The hands-on stage is where the swirl-reveal idea earned its place: it had to read clearly as it grew.
Sketch development through to refined CAD form.
Speculative design let us tackle something heavy, discrimination in dating and interaction, with a solution that is both functional and symbolic, and unmistakably inclusive.
As a group of six we each owned a product, but held one shared design language, so everything we made read as a single, coherent family aligned to the mission. My piece, the Neuro Ring, showed me how technology and user-centred design together can genuinely shape how people connect.
Neuro Ring · Ben & Jerry's speculative project · Mo Rezaei · Product Design