The Little Things

Inspiration

It's the little things...And your WHOLE city is in on it.

We all know we need to slow down and notice the world around us, but modern social media works against that. Platforms are built for performative highlights, showing off the extraordinary rather than the ordinary. There is no dedicated space for the micro-moments: the way the morning light hits a your bedroom window, or an oddly shaped rock found on the walk to class.

Inspired by the viral Colorwalk wellness trend, The Little Things turns everyday mindfulness into a shared experience. Instead of doomscrolling through disconnected feeds, users receive a unified daily prompt, encouraging them to look up, pay attention, and document what they find. It transforms your daily routine into a collective scavenger hunt, turning a city of strangers into a community connected by life's little joys.

What it does

The Little Things gives everyone the same daily prompt, a small thing to notice, like "purple" or "cool sneakers." When you spot it, you take a photo. The app pins that moment where you stood.

Your day becomes a path. Your captures connect in time order into a rough trace of where the prompt took you. Friends see each other's paths as colored lines on a shared map. Friendships are pairwise, added by username or share code, no groups, no circles, no follower counts. Strangers see only unlinked pins. The public city map shows every find as an isolated point, with no way to tell which photos came from the same person. The city builds a mosaic. Every photo from the day collages together, live until the day rolls over, then locks into Memories. Insights aggregate the city's day: when people noticed, where density clustered, what themes surfaced.

How we built it

Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind on the front. Mapbox through react-map-gl for everything spatial. One map component that renders three completely different experiences depending on who's looking: your path, your friends' colored paths, or the public city layer of anonymous pins.

Supabase for the back end: Postgres, Storage, and Auth. Photos compress client-side before upload so a phone camera shot doesn't quietly eat your data plan.

Day logic is anchored to ET with a 10PM rollover. Prompts resolve entirely client-side from a rotating list, zero server round-trip to know what today's prompt is. Check-ins snapshot the prompt at capture time so a find never gets reattributed if the list changes.

Reve for the visual identity. Every illustration, marker, and brand element. The warm parchment palette and field-note aesthetic came from there.

Challenges we ran into

A good product is a simple product. We initially spent hours chasing complex features, only to realize they were just cluttering the user experience. Stepping back and simplifying our idea was difficult, but simplicity was actually how we landed on our final idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works. Real photos, real GPS, real friends, real paths deployed and live with 61 captures before we pitched it.

The crossing detection runs quietly in the background. 150 metre radius, 45 minute window. When two friends' paths overlap, a dot appears on the map and tells you where and when. When a stranger crosses your path five times without either of you knowing ... the app tells you that too, without revealing who.

The path replay. Watching your friends' days draw themselves across a map in chronological order, each photo expanding as the line arrives, is the moment the whole thing made sense.

What we learned

The most interesting decisions weren't technical. We had stranger crossing data. We chose not to show who because the city layer only works if people trust it. Privacy isn't a feature you add at the end.

One CSS file shared by four people at 3AM is an organisational problem, not a technical one.

And: if you build something you'd actually use, every design decision gets easier. "Would we open this?" was the only filter we needed.