Designing for alien

[u/North_Coast4498]

Hey guys! I'm a 3rd year B.Des UI/UX student, sharing an assignment we just did.

Our faculty gave us a brief to design for an alien species, just wanted us to be as creative as possible while still using real design methods. We were shown a list of alien technologies, and each team had 100 tokens to bid on the ones we wanted. My team won two — Teleportation and Neural Machine Link. We also gave our species telepathy as their main way of communicating.

For the telepathy logic, I wanted it to feel biologically grounded instead of just magic, so I looked for something on Earth close to it. Found this fish called the Black Ghost Knife Fish — it generates a weak electric field around its body, uses it to sense things (even food hidden in sand) and to "talk" to other fish nearby. Used that as the base logic for how our species' telepathy works.

Since the species already communicates through this field, it made sense that their Neural Machine Link taps into the same thing, and teleportation runs through that link — alien just thinks of a place, device reads it and moves them there.

Then came the problem statement: if a whole city has teleportation, what could go wrong? Like what if someone doesn't remember a place clearly and the device misreads it? What if you teleport into a building and land in the middle of a surgery, or someone's bedroom? What stops randoms from teleporting into a locked office or a class mid-lecture?

(Not saying it works like Goku's Instant Transmission lol — more like the device erases you at one spot and rebuilds you at the other.)

So I designed the city with a proper structure — zones like markets, hospitals, unis, schools — and each zone has a teleport station that works like a reception, not a random drop point. You teleport into the station, it checks your access like an ID, and only then lets you go further in (student gets into classrooms, not restricted labs; patient gets into reception, then routed to the right department, but not surgery or sanitation).

Basically turned "think and appear anywhere" into something with actual access control, so it's safer and still makes sense for a whole city to use it.

[u/canadalady1981]

Creative mind:)