Product Design · Figma Hackathon
Presence
In 48 hours at a Figma Hackathon, our team of four designed a speculative wearable that gently guides wandering attention back, without pings, timers or guilt.
Problem
Focus tools answer drifting attention with more interruption: pings, timers, app blockers and scores. Underneath most of them is the same message, that you should be doing better. None of them let you simply come back.
Solution
A wearable that notices drift, responds with a soft haptic pulse, and acknowledges your return with one warm glow. No streaks, no logs, and a companion app that never keeps score.
Context
The Challenge
Presence explores what it means to design for something you can't see: the moment your mind wanders, and the quiet act of coming back. Instead of asking how to force focus, we asked what guidance feels like when it doesn't judge.
The problem wasn't that attention drifts. It was that nothing handled the drift with any softness. Every existing tool added friction to a moment that was already fragile.
There's no tool that just lets you come back.
Discovery
Mapping Calm Technology
With 48 hours, research had to move fast. We mapped three areas in parallel: how minds drift and return, what existing wearables do and why they often fail, and calm technology, which designs for the edge of awareness rather than the center of it. Presence is for people whose minds wander without noticing, not by choice.
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The most important interaction isn't the cue. It's the return.
Ideation
Soft Light, Not a Searchlight
We needed a way to make an invisible experience tangible, and the firefly became our metaphor: intermittent, soft, warm, and never demanding. The interaction logic followed from it. The wearable notices drift, sends a gentle pulse rather than a buzz, and asks nothing if you don't come back right away. Only the return is acknowledged; the drift is never recorded.
Idea 1 / 2
Design
Nothing That Demands
The final prototype covers the device, its idle and drift states, the return cue, and the companion app. The app shows only the current focus state, session length, and one soft action to start or end a session, with no history graphs and no comparisons to yesterday.
The return moment
Companion app
The team
Deliverables
What We Built in 48 Hours
Interaction model
Detect drift, one soft pulse, acknowledge the return.
Device states
Idle, drift and return, each with its own light behavior.
Companion app
State, session and one gentle action, with no scores or history.
Working prototype
The full experience, prototyped within the hackathon.
Outcome
What's Next
What was delivered
- A working prototype in 48 hours
- Device idle, drift and return states
- A companion app with no scores or history
What I'd test next
- Test whether a single haptic pulse is noticed without being disruptive
- Explore privacy-first drift detection
- Run short diary studies on how the return moment feels
Reflection
What this project taught me
Designing for something invisible meant designing the feeling around it. Presence taught me that what a product chooses not to track can matter as much as what it shows, and that caring for a user can sometimes mean doing less.