Starrt: Reconnecting with Creative Energy

Inspiration

As students, our team experiences the same pressures that many young adults face today—heavy academic workloads, constant deadlines, and the pressure to always be productive. Over time, this pace can lead to burnout, leaving little room for exploration or creative thinking.

What makes this especially meaningful to us is that we are all creatives in our free time. Some of us enjoy design, others writing, music, or other forms of artistic expression. Yet during the most stressful parts of the semester, creativity is often the first thing to disappear.

We began to wonder: What if we could better understand when creativity naturally appears?

Instead of leaving creativity to chance, we wanted a way to recognize and support those moments.

What We Built

We created Starrt, a platform that helps users understand and track their creative energy.

Using a companion wearable ear cuff, neurological and physiological signals are recorded throughout the day. These signals capture subtle shifts in cognitive energy and are translated into a Spark Score, representing a user's current creative state.

The platform allows users to:

View patterns in their creative energy over time
Analyze insights about when they feel most inspired
Explore creations from others at similar Spark Score levels
Share their own work when they enter a creative flow state

By combining self-awareness with community inspiration, Starrt turns creativity tracking into an engaging platform rather than just another wellness tool.

How We Built It

Our goal was to design a system that transforms internal signals into meaningful insights for creators.

The experience works in several steps:

Physiological Tracking
A wearable ear cuff collects neurological and physiological signals throughout the day.
Creative State Analysis
These signals are analyzed and translated into a Spark Score that reflects a user's current creative state.
Insight Visualization
Users can view analytics and patterns that show when they tend to feel most inspired or mentally energized.
Creative Community
Users can explore what others created at similar Spark Score levels for inspiration, or post their own work when they feel creatively engaged.

What We Learned

Working on Starrt helped us think about creativity in a new way.

We learned that:

Creativity often follows internal rhythms rather than appearing randomly.
Self-awareness can help people work with their natural energy patterns.
Technology can support creativity when it focuses on insight and inspiration rather than productivity pressure.
Community plays an important role in helping people feel motivated and creatively connected.

Challenges We Faced

One of our biggest challenges was ensuring the platform would support wellness for people with all levels of creativity.

We were concerned that if users saw a low Spark Score, they might feel discouraged from creating at all. We didn’t want creativity to feel like a performance metric or something users could "fail."

To address this, we designed Starrt with a social and inspirational component. Even when users are not in a high creative state, they can explore what others are creating, discover new ideas, and feel inspired. Inspiration itself can be a powerful driver of creativity.

By making the platform interactive and community-driven, Starrt encourages creativity rather than limiting it.