MyBodyBuddy

MyBodyBuddy is a wellness app that behaves exactly like a wellness app, which is precisely the danger the project is built to expose rather than describe from a safe critical distance. Constructed as speculative design rather than argumentative essay, the interface borrows wholesale from the visual conventions of the genre it interrogates: rounded icons, soft gradients, encouraging microcopy, and native-feeling push notifications that arrive with the same cheerful urgency as any commercial wellness product on the market. That borrowed familiarity is the entire mechanism of the critique, walking users straight into the manipulation before their guard is up, letting the logic of the system register on a felt, bodily level before it ever reaches conscious analysis. The fiction extends well past a single app: two nested satirical companion platforms, Thinstagram and Yumblr, run alongside it with functioning feeds of their own, while a layer of conditional logic escalates notifications over time in response to simulated user behavior, mimicking the exact reinforcement loops that real wellness platforms use to keep people opening the app. None of it was built as sketch-level satire; every screen, feed, and notification was produced at full production fidelity, on the theory that a parody built at anything less than full fidelity reads simply as bad design rather than as argument.