A journal celebrating the modern self-portrait: selfies.

Selfies capture who we are, yet they’re often seen as performative. Iris reframes selfies as a practice for self-reflection.

Duration: Spring 2025, 13 weeks

Team: Billy Peng, Stanley Ip

Tools: SolidWorks, Keyshot, Adobe Illustrator, Figma

A dial for scrolling through images.

A rotary switch for filtering by time: day, month, or year.

Includes a selfie-specific camera on the left.

Designed for assembly + disassembly as a long-term object.

ContextToday’s fast-paced media often leaves little room for thought, leading to lost time, weaker memory development, and consequently, one’s sense of identity.

Additionally, modern forms of documentation tend to be geared toward sharing and social media, not the self.

What would a familiar medium, photography, look like as a tool for self-reflection?

Ideation

Tradition of Self PortraitsHistorically, self portraits have served as a tool for deep self-exploration and understanding. Today, we continue that tradition through selfies.

The Modern Selfie DualityAt first glance, the selfie is seen as vain. Yet, it has the potential to become a tool for identity formation and memory keeping. Selfies can place you in time: in context of the past, present, and projecting the future.

From there, we designed a system inspired by how memory works—encoding, storage, and retrieval. A camera that capture (encodes) selfies, while another device stores and lets you revisit them.

Iris aims to foster purposeful documentation and introspection—one that helps us better understand who we were, who we are, and where we are headed.

[1] Take Selfies

Carried throughout your day, the quick nature of the product keeps you in the moment.

[2] Store + select
your selfie.

Storage mode allows you to use the dials and select a photo to look back to on a day.

[3] Look back at old memories.

By moving the sliders on the calendar, you can go to a specific date.
Ex: “What was last year’s graduation like?”

Process

Encoding: Camera

PhilosophyEncouraging people to take authentic selfies - ones that don’t interrupt the moment and lowers the fear of judgement.

Object Criteria- Small, portable, and fast to interact
- Light, simple, calm, quiet
- Present, reflective
- Designed for a lifetime

At first we focused on portable, stick-like concepts to enable greater field of view.

Moved to a more compact form, taking inspiration from pocket mirrors.

Gradually, we pivoted to a circular design resembles a cookie. It feels warmer in the palm and naturally guides the way you hold it—encouraging you to point it toward yourself.

We also explored a magnetic cover that protects the lens and mirror due to the long-term nature of the design. Eventually scrapped for a faster, one-hand capture experience.

Adding a large shutter button, mirror, and establishing hierarchy on the face.

The Final Camera

Smaller form refinements such as a finger divot on the shutter button, a convex back, and chamfer surfacing were made to serve the idea of a quick but durable camera.

Storage + Retrieval: The Capsule

PhilosophyPromoting engagement in curating and archiving selfies, and providing opportunities to reflect on past selfies.

Object Criteria- Large and protective: time capsule
- Focused and exploratory interactions
- Designed for a lifetime

Inspired by Will Odom’s work, we found the capsule could be an opportunity to explore different pathways of accessing memory.

Fast and Exploratory: two dials that work together to enable user to scroll through photos in scale of year, months, and day.

Slow and Precise: enable one to directly jump to a specific time frame within the decade.

What does exploratory, playful browsing look or feel like?

Taking inspiration from Bladerunner, we settled on a 2-handed dial form to help encourage a fully engaging interaction (like an instrument).

Deciding between an industrial or streamlined silhouette while maintaining the idea of a protective vessel.

Establishing the interaction points and adjusting the form to accomodate the internals.

Splitting the shell for assembly/disassembly.