STILL

Inspiration

We started with a simple observation — people spend hours every day completely disconnected from their own bodies. Not because they're careless, but because the brain is doing exactly what it's designed to do: filtering out bodily signals to prioritize cognitive demands. We wanted to explore what it would mean to give those signals back.

What it does

STILL is a speculative wearable backrest that makes the invisible, felt. It translates the body's unconscious signals — postural shifts, tension patterns, attentional drift — into perceptible experience, closing the gap between what your body knows and what your mind receives. Through subtle haptic feedback and a companion app, STILL makes attention and physical awareness measurable for the first time.

How we built it

We began with extensive secondary research into proprioception, sensory suppression, cross-modal attention, and the neuroscience of focus. We mapped our findings into affinity clusters, identified key insights, and used analogous research — including the Oura Ring — to understand how existing tools fall short. From there we developed two user personas, mapped their journeys, and designed a hardware concept and companion app grounded in sensor fusion combining pressure sensors and IMUs.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was resisting the pull toward the familiar. A posture tracker is easy to design. A tool that speculatively extends human perception is much harder to frame, justify, and design with intention. Every feature had to earn its place not just functionally but conceptually — staying true to the idea that STILL isn't an app, it's a perceptual bridge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have taken all of that research and translated it into a functional, thorough prototype of both the physical backrest device and a complete companion app including home dashboard, focus patterns, weekly insights, goals, achievements, settings, haptic feedback customization, monitoring sensitivity, privacy controls, and focus mode. The research lives was worth it when it came to designing the products.

What we learned

That the most powerful design problems aren't the ones nobody has solved — they're the ones nobody has named yet. The gap between sensation and perception exists in every human body. It just needed a frame. We also learned that speculative design requires you to defend every decision not just with logic but with feeling. The research has to live in the product, not just behind it.

What's next for STILL

We spent a lot of our time on research, so next for STILL is more work on its design and branding.

Built With

• figma