Umwelt

Block out distractions with Umwelt and enjoy a hero’s journey through nature.

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Inspiration

Burnout is a prevalent issue in today’s fast-paced society, as highlighted by Byung-Chul Han in his book The Burnout Society. Burnout is not a medical diagnosis. Rather, it is characterized by intense emotional exhaustion. This is caused by the productivity-focused, auto-exploitative society, as well as the information overload that comes with social media. Space today seems to be less “grounded” and more “virtual”. To combat this, we hope to provide uninterrupted time through Umwelt to help people recenter and revitalize. We provide small milestones for people to accomplish in a gamified manner. We chose walking through nature as an activity due to its accessibility and effectiveness, though, if we had more time, we would like to consider the design question of “how can we accommodate those who are not able-bodied or do not have safe communities to walk in?” Though we recognize that this is a systematic issue, we hope to make incremental changes through micro-interventions like Umwelt.

What it does

Block out distractions with Umwelt and enjoy a hero’s journey through nature. During your walk, you will unlock various encounters in your surroundings. Look out for and capture these moments and absorb the beauty of the spaces around you.

Burnout is the opposite of vitality — it is utter exhaustion. Through Umwelt, we hope to reshape individual perceptions of experiences and reality to revitalize daily life. In doing so, we hope to drive transformation in modern productivity culture and curb the development of a burnout society.

Mission

To revitalize society by finding little moments of magic in nature

Vision

Encouraging sustainable and balanced lifestyles

It can be difficult to swim against the currents of social media in an age of constant information overload. With Umwelt, we can embark on an adventure of mindset transformation to move towards a balanced life.

Transforming experiences to enhance our collective vitality

Let’s take a moment to reshape our interactions with the spaces we inhabit to nourish our physical, mental, and spiritual vitality.

Becoming able to simply exist

What does it mean to live a “good” life? Taking a walk in nature is “unproductive” by societal standards, which is precisely why we should do it: to relish in the art of lingering and of simply being.

How we built it

Our team collaborated on the low-fidelity design process, then began to branch off into high-fidelity design (Annie and Stephanie), research and web development (Bella), and iOS development (Sean). Annie and Stephanie worked with Figma and Adobe Illustrator; Bella worked with Next.js, GSAP, SASS, and Bootstrap; and Sean worked with Swift. We maintained open communication and discussion throughout the process to ensure we stayed on the right track and adhered to our initial visions.

Challenges we ran into

As a team, our main challenge was brainstorming ways to use technology to encourage independence from it. For Sean, it was challenging to learn how to use iOS frameworks for the camera and map under time constraints. For Annie and Stephanie, the linear user flow was challenging due to being different from what you’d expect from a typical app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our first in-person hackathon experience, so we are proud of coming this far under immense time pressure. Our ideation process was highly enjoyable, and we are proud of stepping out of our comfort zones to design an experience rather than a tool. We also figured out our strengths quickly and adapted to fit them into the creation process.

What we learned

So much… The design team learned how to animate boxes, Sean learned iOS animation and frameworks, Bella learned new front-end animation and interaction techniques, and we all learned how to collaborate within a cross-functional team.

What's next for Umwelt

We hope to expand Umwelt further as a personal project. After developing an MVP, we would like to have people test it and start gathering user feedback.

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