gutsy

the second brain

Swallow a capsule the size of a vitamin. Read your gut.

The gut has 500 million neurons and makes most of the body's serotonin, yet everything it says stays beneath conscious awareness. Gutsy is a speculative health tool that lets someone listen in — a smart pill travels the gut, reads every signal, and the app translates it into something you can actually read.

problem → solution

Your gut has been sending signals every day. You just never got the notification.

how it works

Five dimensions, read from the inside.

We mapped the gut-brain axis before opening Figma — the science became five dashboard dimensions (metabolic, mental, hormonal, immune, risk), each carried by its own shifting gradient orb. No two guts are alike; the visual system makes that feel true.

design system

One system holds it together: mono type, black canvas, living gradients.

A compact design system kept four designers building as one — a three-level mono type scale, a 4px spacing grid, status colors for the body's good and bad news, and a gradient orb per gut domain so every dimension is recognizable at a glance.

who it's for

The personas are not demographics. They are the emotional core.

Maya and Dan came from experiences our own team has had — the frustration of not knowing why your body feels off, and of doing everything right without seeing results.

screens

Nine surfaces, in the order someone actually moves through them.

safeguards

Deciding what to leave out was harder than deciding what to show.

Hunger runs on ghrelin — a noisy, stress-reactive signal that could feed disordered eating patterns, so we chose not to build it. The Risk dimension reads "patterns worth watching," never diagnoses, and a live view shows exactly where the pill is in your body: speculative shouldn't mean irresponsible, and a black box shouldn't be swallowed.

closer than it looks

The capsule already exists. We designed the layer above it.

Atmo Biosciences received FDA 510(k) clearance in June 2025 for a vitamin-sized, gas-sensing ingestible capsule — the foundation is real. What we designed is everything that turns a medical device into something someone might actually want to use: the interface, the five-dimension framing, the ethical scoping, the emotional register.

reflection

The goal was never to make people depend on the app. It was to help them put the phone down.

Gutsy works best over weeks, then makes itself unnecessary — that felt like the honest thing to design toward. Four days was short and we didn't win anything, but we left with a clearer belief about what speculative design is for: not a concept video, a rehearsal for the ethics of tools that are genuinely coming.