Anatomy of Dependency
Mengxue Zhong
Smartphones have quietly become the most personal devices we own. There is a fundamental shift underway: the boundaries between humans and modern technology are actively merging. Through our devices, human development is quietly being recorded— written into the data we leave behind and accumulated into our individual and collective living infrastructure. This isn’t dysfunction, it’s evolution.
The Anatomy of Dependency maps the experience of human and smartphone codependency within our lives. The project reveals the depth of digital reliance through a systematic evolution across three scales: the interpersonal, or how our bodies adapt through smartphone use; the interconnected, or the exchange between data that empowers our social lives and daily routines; and the socio-technical, how smartphone networks shape our society’s infrastructure.
Through data visualization that spans the personal to the infrastructural and represented through symbols and a design system, this work reveals how modern technology evolves alongside our identities that are often obscured by everyday routine. Surfacing the hidden yet deeply relatable patterns of human-machine dependency, this project creates space for awareness, by asking what it means to become inseparable from technology and whether we are shaping that relationship consciously.