Renue

Inspiration

What it does

Renue — Retraining the Body's Memory

What Inspired Us

We started with a simple observation: people we know have tried therapy, meditation apps, and breathing exercises to move past traumatic experiences — and still find themselves ambushed by a smell, a sound, or a sight that takes them right back. The emotion wasn't the problem. Something deeper was firing.

That question led us to the neuroscience of memory reconsolidation and sensory encoding. We learned that at the moment of trauma, the nervous system doesn't just record what happened — it permanently encodes the sensory experience attached to it. That encoded signal keeps firing as a present-tense alarm long after the threat has passed. We called it Mnemonic Sensory Imprinting, and we couldn't find a single consumer product designed to address it directly.

That gap is what inspired Renue.

What We Learned

Building Renue taught us that the hardest design problems aren't visual — they're emotional. Every decision we made had to balance two things: being honest about what the user is carrying, and making them feel safe enough to engage with it. We learned that:

Removing information can be as powerful as adding it. Hiding biometric scores, removing percentage breakdowns, and stripping back UI during sessions all made the experience feel safer and more human. Language is a design material. The difference between "track your trauma" and "make space for it to happen" is the difference between a clinical tool and one someone actually opens. Speculative design requires conviction. Designing for hardware that doesn't yet exist — haptic wristbands, smart diffusers — forced us to think beyond the screen and imagine what the full sensory experience of healing could feel like.

How We Built It

We built Renue as a speculative design prototype in Figma, with interactive flows built in Figma Make. The core experience follows Maya — a 28-year-old whose car accident left her unable to drive in the rain — through her first session and her fifth, demonstrating the shift the product creates over time. The product is structured around four phases per session:

Acknowledge→Deconstruct→Transform→Consolidate\text{Acknowledge} \rightarrow \text{Deconstruct} \rightarrow \text{Transform} \rightarrow \text{Consolidate}Acknowledge→Deconstruct→Transform→Consolidate

Each phase targets the sensory signal at a different level of intensity, guided by real-time biometric feedback from a sensor watch reading HRV and EDA responses. Progress is visualized through two outputs: a sensory map showing the charged sense node dimming across sessions, and a one-word trail — a single word the user chooses after every session that tells the story their body is living through.

The design system was built around a single dark background #1A1714 with a calming teal accent #2A6860, using Cormorant Garamond for emotional weight and Figtree for clarity. Every decision was made to reduce cognitive load and keep the user present in the experience rather than managing an interface.

Challenges We Faced

Designing for trauma without triggering it. The hardest challenge was building an intake flow that asks users to engage with their most charged sensory memories without retraumatizing them. We solved this by keeping the memory private, removing clinical language, and letting the sensor watch do the measurement work silently.

Balancing speculation with credibility. Renue sits at the intersection of neuroscience, product design, and speculative hardware. We had to be precise enough about the science to earn trust, while being honest that some components — haptic wristbands, smart diffusers — are near-future rather than today.

Knowing what to cut. Early versions of the prototype had far too much information on screen. The biggest design breakthrough came when we stripped almost everything back — and realized the product felt more powerful with less. The one-word trail replaced a drawing canvas. A dimming orbit replaced a progress graph. Restraint became the design language.

Communicating progress without numbers. Users dealing with traumatic memory are often hypervigilant and self-critical. Showing a percentage score or improvement metric would have created pressure rather than relief. Designing a progress system that felt true without being measurable was one of the most interesting problems we solved.

Built With

• figma