Constellation
Inspiration
We started with a question from Track 1: Post-Scarcity Society:
If money is no longer a problem, what problems still remain?
At first, we kept coming back to stress.
Money can remove financial pressure, but it cannot remove uncertainty, difficult conversations, unfamiliar situations, relationships, excitement, fear, or all the other emotions that come with everyday life.
Our first idea was to help young adults understand stress.
But as we worked on it, we realised the problem was broader than that.
We go through meaningful experiences all the time. A presentation. Meeting new people. Trying something for the first time. An argument. A good day with friends.
In the moment, we know how those experiences feel.
Later, they usually become separate memories.
That makes it difficult to notice the bigger patterns:
What kinds of situations affect me in similar ways?
How do my emotions tend to change through an experience?
What keeps happening across different moments in my life?
That became the idea behind Constellation.
How can we connect separate experiences over time so people can better understand the patterns in how life affects them?
What it does
Constellation is a reflection app that connects experiences and emotions over time.
Each experience becomes a Moment.
A Moment can begin in two ways:
- Manual Moment — the user chooses to record something themselves.
- Body-noticed Moment — an optional wearable notices an unusual physiological change and asks whether the user wants to reflect on what was happening.
The wearable does not decide what the user is feeling.
A racing heart could come from a presentation, exercise, excitement, fear, meeting someone new, or something completely different.
It only notices that something changed.
The user gives the Moment meaning by recording:
- what happened;
- how they felt;
- the context;
- and what happened next.
That Moment then becomes part of their Universe.
The Universe
Our visual system turns those records into something users can explore.
- Stars represent individual Moments.
- Planets represent emotions.
- Halos show Moments first noticed by the wearable.
- Paths show recurring relationships between emotions and experiences.
- Constellations appear when similar connections repeat over time.
One Moment might look like:
Presentation → Nervous → Pride
Another might be:
Dinner with new people → Nervous → Joy
And another:
First pottery class → Nervous → Calm → Joy
Individually, they are just separate memories.
But as more Moments build up, Constellation may show that unfamiliar experiences in the user's recorded history often begin with Nervous and later include Pride, Calm, or Joy.
It does not tell the user what that pattern means.
It simply makes the connection visible and lets them look back at the Moments behind it.
Moments become Stars. Emotions become Planets. Repeated connections become Constellations.
How we built it
We designed Constellation as a connected wearable and iPhone experience.
The two devices have different jobs.
Wearable — notice the Moment
The wearable acts as an optional Moment detector.
If it notices an unusual physiological response, it can quietly ask:
Would you like to reflect on this?
The user can reflect immediately, save it for later, or ignore it.
Nothing is automatically labelled as stress, and nothing enters the user's Universe until they choose to reflect on it.
iPhone — reflect and connect
The iPhone is where the user adds meaning.
They record what happened, select the emotions they experienced in the order they changed, add context, and record what happened afterwards.
That Moment then becomes a Star in their Universe and connects to the relevant emotion Planets.
As more Moments are added, repeated connections can begin to appear as patterns.
Our core flow became:
Notice → Reflect → Connect → Discover
We also created a Story View, which shows the same Moments as a simple chronological timeline.
The Universe is the main visual interface, but users do not have to rely on colour, motion, or spatial navigation to access their history.
The wearable is also optional. The full experience can still work through manual Moment entry on the phone.
Challenges we ran into
Finding the actual problem
Our biggest challenge was deciding what we were really trying to solve.
We started with stress.
Then we explored stress tracking, wearable sensing, emotional reflection, recovery patterns, and eventually decision-making.
At one point, the idea became too focused on helping people make choices.
That did not fully match what we had actually designed.
The product was recording much more than decisions or negative emotions. It was capturing experiences, emotional changes, context, and what happened afterwards.
We eventually realised that the stronger problem was not simply:
How do we reduce stress?
or:
How do we make better decisions?
It was:
How do we connect experiences that would normally remain separate memories, so recurring emotional patterns become easier to see?
That gave the rest of the product a much clearer direction.
Deciding what the wearable should do
Our early ideas gave wearable data a much larger role.
But a physiological response does not tell us what an experience means.
A presentation might make someone's heart race.
So could exercise.
So could a first date.
So could an argument.
The body response may look similar while the experience feels completely different.
That led to one of our most important design decisions:
The wearable notices. The user interprets. Constellation connects.
The wearable became a Moment detector rather than an emotion detector.
Making the universe useful
We also did not want the space theme to exist just because it looked interesting.
Every element needed to represent something real.
Stars became experiences.
Planets became emotions.
Paths represented recurring connections.
Constellations represented patterns that emerged across multiple Moments.
The universe became part of how the information works, rather than decoration added on top.
Showing patterns without pretending they are facts
Another challenge was deciding what Constellation should say when it finds a repeated relationship.
If several recorded Moments include a walk followed by Calm, we cannot say:
“Walking causes you to feel calm.”
We can only say that, in the user's recorded history, walking was followed by Calm several times.
So patterns in Constellation are observations, not conclusions.
An association, not a cause.
Users should always be able to open the Moments behind a pattern and decide for themselves whether it feels meaningful.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that the idea became much clearer as we worked on it.
We started with a broad question around stress and gradually found a product that could include difficult emotions, positive emotions, unfamiliar experiences, relationships, challenges, and everyday moments without treating any of them as a score.
We are also proud of the relationship we designed between the user and the wearable.
Instead of making technology decide what someone feels, we kept interpretation with the person who actually experienced the Moment.
We are especially happy with the way the Universe developed.
The visual system is not just a theme:
One Moment becomes a Star.
Emotions become Planets.
Repeated connections become Constellations.
That made the name of the product, the interface, and the way the information is organised all support the same idea.
We also designed a Story View so users can access the same Moments without relying entirely on the visual Universe.
What we learned
The biggest thing we learned was:
Measuring stress and understanding an experience are not the same thing.
A wearable can notice a change in the body.
It cannot fully explain why that change happened or what it meant to the person experiencing it.
That changed the wearable from something that tried to recognise emotions into something much simpler: a way to notice Moments that might otherwise be forgotten.
We also learned that the value of Constellation does not come from one Moment.
One Moment is just one memory.
The useful part appears over time, when separate Moments begin to connect.
A presentation and a pottery class may look completely unrelated.
But if both begin with Nervous and later include Pride or Joy, that relationship might become worth noticing.
We also learned not to treat difficult emotions as failures.
A large Tension or Nervous planet does not mean someone is doing badly.
It only means that emotion appeared frequently in the Moments they recorded.
Finally, we learned that Constellation should not tell people what their patterns mean.
The user's past can provide evidence, but it should not become another system telling them how to live.
Your past is evidence, not instruction.
What's next for Constellation
The next step is testing the idea with real users over time.
The product becomes more useful as Moments accumulate, so a short demo cannot answer all of the questions we care about.
We want to test:
- whether people actually find these patterns meaningful;
- how many Moments are needed before showing a pattern;
- when a repeated connection is strong enough to be worth showing;
- how often wearable prompts feel helpful rather than intrusive;
- whether users understand the relationship between Stars, Planets, and Constellations;
- whether difficult emotions can be visualised without creating self-judgement;
- and whether people return to their past Moments when facing similar situations later.
We would also continue improving accessibility through the Story View, reduced motion, clear labels, shapes in addition to colour, and alternative ways to record Moments.
In the future, Constellation could also help users bring relevant past experiences back into view when they face something similar again.
But it would still follow the same principle.
It would not choose for them.
It would not diagnose them.
It would not tell them what their life means.
It would simply help them see what has already happened.
The wearable notices. The user interprets. Constellation connects.
Constellation is not a score of how well you are living.
It is a map of how life moves you.
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