By Conner Eastwood and Ewan McIntosh, March 2026
StudioCone’s Circular Assistant Asks: What If Siri Was Trying to Save the World?
The nudge. The notification. The reward that keeps you coming back. The psychological toolkit that shapes our behaviour has, until now, been pointed almost entirely in one direction. StudioCone’s Circular Assistant asks what happens when you turn it around.
An audio companion designed for regenerative and circular living, the Circular Assistant offers personalised strategies, daily suggestions, and gamified encouragement, from reimagining leftovers to optimising travel choices. By embedding ecological logic into everyday routines, it creates a feedback loop where personal well-being and planetary health stop competing and start reinforcing one another.
Processing real-time spatial data, combined with the extensive information catalogue of the Internet of Things, the Circular Assistant builds a constant map of the world around you. Every choice you’re faced with is navigated toward something more planet-centric, without ever asking you to stop and look down at a screen.
As AI agents become more pervasive and more anthropomorphised, woven into the texture of the everyday, the Circular Assistant asks whether that same toolkit could instead be pointed toward mutually beneficial practices that benefit the user and planet in equal measure. By rewarding better choices and keeping the user conscious of the way they use resources, the climate crisis becomes an everyday thought lensed through actionable activities, rather than an overwhelming abstraction.
The project exists within StudioCone’s speculative 2030, where humanity failed to meet the 1.5°C target and ANIMA, an autonomous planetary intelligence combining artificial and biological systems, emerges to guide planetary stability through technologies inspired by symbiosis. If you were mandated a companion that helped you make more circular decisions, would you welcome it, or would it feel like an uninvited guest?
The Circular Assistant is ultimately a metaphor: symbolic of whether, if we were helped little by little to be more kind to the planet, would we rise to the challenge?
Symbiotic Systems is a collaboration between Conner Eastwood and Ewan McIntosh, with sound design and original score by George Davies.
To read more about the Symbiotic Systems project, visit @studiocone_
