What if there was an app for social avoidance? Not a workaround. A product. One that generates creative excuses, tracks who you've used them on, and helps you keep your stories straight, because we all do this anyway, we just do it badly. Concealed is that app. It is also, deliberately, a provocation.
The project grew from something real: how technology builds infrastructure and convenience while quietly shifting the balance of our social connections, and what that means for how we relate to each other. The conversation was already happening around it. People were debating whether ending a relationship by text message or app was acceptable, and whether the medium itself changed the weight of the message. In Japan, resignation agencies emerged as an industry: companies you pay to call your employer and quit on your behalf, because the face-to-face conversation had become something some people could not bring themselves to have. Other services offer hired companions: someone to play a friend, a partner, a grandparent, for people who need the shape of connection without the vulnerability of building it themselves.
These are not fringe phenomena. Loneliness has become a public health concern on a global scale. And at the same time, social pressure to be present, available, and engaged has never been higher. The tension between those two forces is where Concealed lives. It does not take sides. It holds up the mirror and lets you decide what you are looking at.
As someone naturally shy, I was drawn to the idea of technology as a social crutch, and what we lose when we lean on it too heavily. Concealed presents the excuse app as a real, designed, usable product, then asks: who is actually responsible when usage crosses a line? The user, who accepted a forty-page terms and conditions without reading it? Or the institution that wrote it that way?
The identity takes its form from computer chips, a maze concealed within the logo itself. The sphere system and motion work extend this idea of something turning, revealing, concealing. The app interface was designed as a fully considered UX, not just a concept: screens that feel familiar, because that is exactly the point.
Sphere System
Logo Development
The logo is built on a paradox: a maze you can look at directly without recognising it as one. Circuit-board geometry forms the lettermark, structured and systematic on the surface, but encoded with concealment underneath. Three iterations tested how much complexity the mark could carry before it became noise. The final version sits precisely at that tension: legible as a brand, hidden as a system. The mark works because it does what the app does. It keeps something in plain sight.
App Interface
Animations
The animations explore different approaches to visualising concealment in motion. The question was: what does hiding look like? What does it sound like? Each piece tests a different visual language: a sweeping radar signal, a glitching token, a geometric transformation. Sound was as important as image throughout the process. I recorded audio, searched for sounds online, and layered them into the motion work to add depth, making sound another dimension of the concept: present in the piece but not always immediately visible, felt more than named.