Scanxiety is a speculative interactive device that reimagines the traditional barcode scanner to reveal not the monetary price of consumer goods, but their emotional cost. Positioned at the intersection of absurdity, critique, and poetic design, the project transforms an everyday self-checkout tool into a mechanism for emotional reflection. Rather than outputting numbers and financial totals, Scanxiety prints receipts that read like psychological diagnostics: “Contains 45% impulsive sadness,” “Craving satisfied. Fulfillment: still pending,” or “Guilt tax applied.” In doing so, it exposes the invisible feelings we attach to our objects, cravings, regrets, nostalgia, and shame and highlights the emotional residue embedded in consumer culture.

The app is a repurposed barcode scanner which generates a receipt. The scanner links to a custom-coded database of emotional outputs, each entry handcrafted based on the cultural context, common use, and symbolic weight of various object types. The emotional “receipts” are predictive; they are satirical yet affectively resonant, composed to parody the quantification of feeling while pointing toward deeper truths about ownership, habit, and late capitalist anxieties.

Through its absurd utility and playful interface, Scanxiety critiques the sterile efficiency of data-driven capitalism and questions the commodification of emotion in a world increasingly obsessed with optimization and self-surveillance. Its aesthetic echoes real retail infrastructure, mirroring receipt formatting and checkout design, to blur the line between the familiar and the surreal. The project invites users to reconsider what their everyday purchases mean emotionally, not just economically. In a time when consumption is often conflated with identity, Scanxiety essentially asks: What are we really buying? And what lingers after?