The Loop
Yuehan Ma
The Loop explores the toxic cycle of desire, wanting, and addiction through design. Many everyday behaviors—buying things we don’t need, scratching lottery tickets, smoking “just one more,” or opening blind boxes—follow the same structure: anticipation, reward, repeat. These patterns quietly shape habits and decisions, often without us noticing. The project examines how visual culture and product design construct and reinforce these cycles.
Rather than simply explaining the mechanism, The Loop turns it into a physical experience. The work is packaged inside a shiny foil pouch that mimics a blind box, referencing products that rely on suspense and surprise to encourage repeated consumption. Inside the pouch is a collection of printed artifacts, each exploring a different form of addictive behavior.
The set includes lottery-style scratch tickets, a book with multiple scratch-off surfaces, lenticular cards, six posters referencing different addictions such as smoking or drugs, and a foldable zine that connects the pieces together. A key element appears in the book: beneath each scratch-off surface, the revealed image is completely unrelated and often unsettling. Instead of a satisfying reward, viewers uncover strange and unpredictable images—such as an exaggerated close-up of someone biting into raw meat. The result feels chaotic and slightly out of control.
By replacing the expected reward with confusion or discomfort, The Loop exposes how addictive systems rely less on meaningful outcomes and more on the endless repetition of anticipation and reveal.