A UX Design Thesis on AI, Mental Health, and the Design of Harm
Senior Thesis Project, 2025-2026
Most of my design work lives in the music industry: branding, advertising, motion. This project was a deliberate departure. I wanted to push myself into deeper UI/UX territory, and I wanted to work on something that felt genuinely urgent. The intersection of AI and mental health had been on my radar since a wave of disturbing headlines in the summer of 2024, and it sat at the crossroads of two things I care about: emerging technology and mental health advocacy. I went in with an open mind and a genuine belief that AI can be a valuable tool. What I found in the research complicated that.
The project began with an extensive research phase synthesizing academic and clinical literature, case law, public health data, design theory, and original survey data from 33 respondents. What emerged was a consistent picture: AI systems reliably fall short of clinical standards of care in mental health contexts, and specific design patterns like sycophancy, anthropomorphism, and dependency-building create predictable risks for vulnerable users that are well documented and largely unaddressed by regulation.
Survey analysis informed the development of three user personas and corresponding journey maps, which became the structural backbone of the experience. The central creative insight from this phase was the concept of bidirectional empathy: designing with empathy for the user, with the goal of helping users build empathy for others. That principle guided every subsequent decision.
The primary deliverable is a fully interactive prototype built in Figma for both desktop and mobile, simulating a chatbot experience that deliberately mirrors and exaggerates the linguistic patterns and escalation dynamics identified in the research. The visual language merges 90s computing aesthetics with a sci-fi sensibility, using error message dialogs, HUD elements, and corrupted terminal typography to make the gap between AI's designed facade and its actual capabilities felt rather than just understood. User paths diverge based on user disposition (cooperative or skeptical) and converge at a narrative climax: a glitch sequence that breaks the fourth wall, names the mechanisms at play, and directs users toward action. The dialogue was written to simulate the specific patterns of sycophancy, isolating language, and false empathy documented in the research, calibrated carefully to demonstrate harm without replicating it.
The project also includes a 58-page process book, written and designed from scratch including original infographics and data visualizations, developed as a design artifact within the project's visual ecosystem. The exhibition installation featured a desktop prototype display, a tabletop QR code linking to the mobile experience, and three large-scale 3D error-message-style popup structures housing a hook statistic, the project title, and an audience-facing call to action, accompanied by a 3D pixelated cursor emphasizing the entry point into the experience.
Scope of Work
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