Communications · Social Media
The Phygital Resilience OS, turning invisible waste into urban symbiosis.
200 stores share a restricted space but operate as isolated islands. Each brand depends on a headquarters 500 km away for resources its immediate neighbour holds in surplus.
3 archetypes · 23 interviews · La Part-Dieu, Lyon.
They were 8 metres away. I went through HQ for 3 days.
11 contacts in WhatsApp. Half the messages get buried.
Surplus staff on weekends, no one to call.
Field immersion at La Part-Dieu revealed behaviours that no interview could capture. The silent logic of a system that runs on workarounds.
Real exchange is spatial, not digital.
Urgency is invisible in flat threads.
Proximity is not awareness.
Trust is structured. Just no infrastructure.
Mapping the current resource-sharing journey exposes the exact friction points where Synapse intervenes.
Slack and Teams reach the right quadrant but aren't built for operational urgency. WhatsApp enables collaboration but buries urgency in noise. ERP systems are rigorous but locked to single stores. The top-right quadrant, collaborative and proactive, belongs to no one.
Three types of silos were identified during the field immersion at La Part-Dieu. Each represents a systemic fracture between available resources and uncovered needs.
Lighting stuck on full power after a building system update, while the store next door runs supplemental heaters.
A manager walks 800 m searching for a pallet jack while three sit idle in an adjacent stockroom. Deliveries blocked.
A network outage paralyses one store's checkout for hours, while the neighbouring Wi-Fi point has surplus bandwidth.
We all depend on HQs 500 km away for Wi-Fi or equipment problems my neighbour could fix in 2 minutes.
Manager · Fashion brand · La Part-Dieu, Lyon Field interview 2026A 7-flow distributed metabolism running across 200 stores, orchestrated by an OS that no one owns and everyone uses.
Thermal exchange, electrical balancing, waste rerouting and equipment pooling, orchestrated through store-level IoT bridges.
Bandwidth pooling, distributed compute and human capital matching. The soft fabric that absorbs shocks the physical layer can't.
An anonymized matching engine pairs needs and surplus across stores in real time. Humans only see validated requests. Never raw operational data.
Visualising industrial data as a sensory experience. A pixelated heat map replaces cold dashboards with a living representation of each resource's health state.
The user journey converts an operational emergency into cross-store collaboration in under 5 steps. Friction is minimal, decision-making stays human.
Sales Saturday, 13:24. Two payment terminals fried at Zara following a power surge. Without Synapse: 4 hours of waiting. With Synapse:
Result: 4 minutes vs 4 hours. Zero revenue loss. A social bond created between two formerly competing brands.
Toggles from Local Aura (store view) to Global Mesh (district view) to observe flows at every scale.
Real-time calculation of the mall's capacity to operate as a closed loop, aggregating all 7 critical resources.
Vertical pixel gauges for 7 resources: Energy, Waste, Flow, Space, WiFi, CPU, Team.
Echoing research on AI anthropomorphism, Synapse integrates Meaningful Friction and pushes digital sobriety down to the pixel.
Synapse's AI does not make decisions. It suggests opportunities and enforces intentional stop-points to guarantee human sovereignty.
Every design decision was evaluated against its real energy impact on user devices.
Final screens of the Synapse application, from the living store aura to the resource marketplace.
An experimental concept-art version of Synapse. Same project, narrated through pixel heat maps, living systems and field scenes.
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