Peter Yang - Synoptic Halo

UIUX DesignIndustrial DesignData VisualizationResearch

Overview

Where I Started

Problem Statement

Smart devices collect voice, behavior, location, preference, and identity data, but users rarely see what is being collected or how it is used.
Privacy controls are often buried in terms, fragmented across devices, and difficult to manage one by one in an IoT environment.

Context

The project responds to the digital panopticon by proposing reverse monitoring: making corporate data collection visible to the person being observed.
Research covered IoT market growth, data privacy risks, large-scale data misuse cases, and user awareness around smart device recordings.

What I Did

Responsibilities & Contributions

Mapped personal data into categories such as identifiable, sensitive, behavioral, and assembled information.
Designed a device that reads data flow from smart environments and projects live visualizations onto walls or ceilings.
Created an app concept for viewing collected data, controlling device permissions, reading privacy terms, and sharing data rights information.

Impact

Visibility

Translated invisible IoT data collection into spatial graphics that can be understood at a glance.

Control

Framed privacy management as an everyday product experience rather than a hidden settings task.

Prototype direction

Connected product design, data visualization, and app design into one reverse-monitoring system.

What I Learned

Key Insights

Data privacy becomes easier to discuss when abstract collection systems are represented as visible, real-time behavior.
A privacy tool needs to be both informational and ambient, so it can live naturally inside the home instead of feeling like a dashboard chore.

Critical Constraints

The prototype was limited by access to live IoT data and by the difficulty of automatically classifying device-level data streams.
Future work would require deeper technical integration with real devices and broader user data patterns.