Tether

Inspiration

Tether was inspired by how easily people lose track of time and attention in today’s digital environment. We were interested in the gap between clock time and felt time (chronoperception) and wanted to explore how design could help people become more aware when their attention begins to drift.

What it does

Tether is a wearable system that helps users notice when their attention drifts. Using subtle haptic feedback and a companion app, it makes patterns of attention and time perception visible, helping users reconnect with the present moment.

How we built it

We designed Tether as a minimal wearable loop connected to a mobile application. The wearable senses body signals and behavioral patterns, while the app visualizes this data through features like a Drift Timeline and daily reflections on how time was experienced.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was designing feedback that is gentle and meaningful without becoming another distracting notification. Translating the abstract idea of felt time into a tangible interaction was also difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of our biggest accomplishments was translating an abstract idea like the experience of time into something people could see and interact with. We were able to build a cohesive system - from the narrative world of the Drifters to the wearable interactions and app visualizations - that makes invisible moments of drifting visible.

What we learned

This project helped us understand how wearable technology, sensory feedback, and behavioral data can be used to design for mindfulness and well-being. Through building Tether, we learned that people rarely notice when their attention drifts until it is reflected back to them. Designing for presence is not about forcing focus, but about creating gentle moments of awareness that help people reconnect with their time.

What's next for Tether

Tether starts by helping individuals see and understand their patterns of attention and time. In the future, it expands into environments, relationships, and systems that respond to and support our temporal experience.

Images and illustrations generated by Gemini AI.