Awareness Radar

Inspiration

We wanted to build an application that is able to heighten our sense of attentional awareness. At first when we began ideating, the idea of increasing our spatial awareness seemed very beneficial to us. As girls living in a city, it can be scary at times to walk home at night even on a seemingly safe campus. Drawing inspiration from "spidey-sense", we thought this would be an extremely helpful tool for those who often commute alone. On the opposite end thinking as students, it would also be helpful to just block out environmental stimuli. This could be helpful when you're cramming for midterms or maybe just at a party with too many people you don't know.

What it does

Our app's key feature is adjusting your awareness from your base level to either "Deep Focus" or "Hyper Aware." Users can then view what external or internal factors are affecting their current awareness level on the app. We also have wearable prototypes to go along with the mobile app that include contact lenses and an earlobe attachment. Users can start and end their focused or aware sessions through the app, but they can also interact with the physical interfaces to manually end a session.

How we built it

We brainstormed on FigJam and individually listed our ideas. From there, we worked together to decide our top ideas and put it to vote. Over the weekend, we kept discussing our idea logistics and potential interfaces. We used Figma for our lo-fi and hi-fi prototyping as well.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled with coming up with the idea more than the actual prototyping, since it was difficult to find a balance between feasibility and superpower realm. Getting on the same page with our app functionalities was definitely a challenge, but we found that drawing out our ideas was very helpful to understand one another. It was also difficult to balance the prototypes, slides, and demo to ensure they were all aligned with one another and high quality work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of being able to just submit a project, because we struggled so much with just coming up with an idea. We overcame communication and design issues to create an idea that we all shared and could be proud of. In the end, we made an app that we would use ourselves, so that is an accomplishment in itself.

What we learned

We learned how stressful the design process can get and how many iterations just one idea takes. Interestingly, we always circled back to our original ideas, so we think that was a lesson in just trusting your gut sometimes. We also learned that making an interface for a technology that doesn't exist is incredibly difficult.

What's next for Awareness Radar

Though the mobile interface for Awareness Radar is ready, we would like to explore the realm of physical technology, such as the contact lenses, where you can see through your lenses itself.

Built With

• figma