Pollinate

What is Pollinate?

You promised yourself as a child that you'd explore the world when you grew up. But somewhere between deadlines and routines, Tuesday started looking exactly like last Tuesday, and you can't remember what last week felt like.

Pollinate is a bracelet and app that restores the quality of attention you had as a child, revealing the hidden surprises already blooming in your everyday life.

It is designed for young adults caught in the repetitive rhythms of school, work, and routine. The bracelet continuously monitors how awake your senses are. When these signals indicate habituation, the bracelet delivers a thermal shift to your wrist, subtle enough to never be registered consciously, just enough to pull you off autopilot. Your attention snaps back to the present, to the bakery you walk past every morning, the light through the trees, or the sound of a street you've somehow never really heard and processed.

The hidden blooms were always there. We just want to help you find them.

Listening Before Designing

We surveyed 100 people (link) and interviewed (link) 5 people about their relationship with time, memory, and everyday experience. 84% described their routine as structured, predictable, or repetitive. 65% said time felt richer as a child. One respondent said: "I wish I could hold sights longer in my memory as I see them. Photos can rarely capture the moment." This told us people aren't losing memories of events, but they’re losing the feeling of being in them.

There's a name for this: perceptual habituation. When your brain decides it already knows what's around you, it stops encoding. You're physically present but perceptually somewhere else. Psychologists call the felt sense of time passing chronoception. When perception dulls, chronoception follows. Days blurring into each other, and all of a sudden, somehow it’s already March.

As children, none of this was a problem. Everything raised a question. The world was full of hidden surprises, and we went looking for all of them.

We built Pollinate to bring that back.

The Challenge of Designing Something You Don’t Notice

Build an intervention that didn't feel like one. The magic of childhood noticing was never forced, and that shouldn’t change. Discovery occurs unintentionally. Anything that drew attention to itself would disturb the very moment it was meant to capture. Pollinate had to work the same way: present enough to shift your state, invisible enough to never feel like another app telling you what to do.

The goal was never dependency. If the bracelet is always the thing that opens perception, the user never rebuilds their own capacity for it. We didn't want to create a device that made you more attentive only while wearing it. Over time, the goal is that moments of noticing start happening on their own, that the bracelet trains a habit of attention that eventually doesn't need the nudge. Over time, the bracelet should just be another piece of jewelry you put on in the morning.

What we learned

Grounding every feature in how we want the user to feel, not what we want them to do. Every time we caught ourselves doing feature-first thinking, we returned to one question: how does this make the user feel, and is that the feeling we are designing for?
Solutions start with listening to people! Every feature traces back to something we heard from a survey response, an interview moment, or a quote that reframed the entire problem. Treating research as something to return to rather than just something to complete made our design decisions faster and more confident.
Iterating fast and growing as designers, researchers, and storytellers over one weekend. This weekend flew by so fast, yet it is one we won’t forget about! Immersing ourselves in these overlapping roles turned out to be the most valuable thing we practiced this weekend!

Future Blooms

Expand to include visuals or haptics: Sensory replay currently offers scent and music. Next would be touch and visuals. We imagine a world where the bracelet can collect senses around the world as you live them as well. The bracelet may record the thermal and pressure signature of peak moments and reproduce like an AR hologram and a physical feeling during memory replay.

Customizations and Annual Recaps: Every December, Pollinate surfaces your year as a sensory archive — your most alive moments across twelve months, mapped and revisit-able. Not a photo recap, but a collection of the Tuesdays that mattered – before you knew they did. The hidden blooms were always there. We just want to help you find them.

How we built it

We used FigJam for brainstorming, Figma for prototyping, and Figma Slides for presentation. We also used Figma Make in a few ways: to quickly spin up a user flow for Pollinate's homepage in the early stages, to generate an initial version of the Insights page that informed our final Figma design, and to smooth out the data visualization animation we originally built on the Home page. For the more detailed work, we built everything manually in Figma, which gave us more control over the details that mattered.

AI played a supporting role throughout: we used Claude and ChatGPT to pressure-test our solution, surface edge cases we hadn't considered, and sharpen our writing. For visuals, AI image generation through Canva and Nano Banana helped us mock up the wearable bracelet and bring the presentation to life.

Presentation: link

Prototype: link