imprint was the result of a challenge to alleviate the stress culture that is so ubiquitous at Carnegie Mellon. The prompt was open-ended as to how to accomplish this task, and, along with Victor Song and Antonio Ono, we decided to create a habit-tracking application. We felt that creating a way for people to easily manage the smaller facets of their life would allow them to relax a little and focus on the bigger tasks at Carnegie Mellon.
Background
inspiration + initial mobile wireframes
Our visual language evolved around experimentation with watercolors, using their amorphous quality to keep from defining habits too much and thus give them an inherent feeling of being free to grow and shrink. We also applied this quality of freedom to the interactions and means of tracking habits because we didn't want any connotations to come into play and make users feel guilty about bad habits like smoking or overeating.
1 : mobile app
The mobile application exists in a personal and refined space, acting as the main means of input. We stripped away connotations after originally thinking about happy and sad faces, another decision aimed to remove feelings of guilt or discomfort. We continued this sense of objectiveness by allowing the user to define the whole interaction in terms of the color choice and how reminders would take effect.
2 : website
The large space of a desktop website allowed us to develop a community for users. They could visualize all of their current habits in one overlapping group and then click through and get fine details about their progress. In a congruent space, the user can scroll through their friends' lives and see how they're doing to create a sense of connection and encourage each other off screen.
3 : collateral
We augmented the application with a range of printed collateral because we knew that the digital spaces were not enough to pull new users into the application and obviously they would not keep users attentive when not interacting with their devices. The first larger posters were printed on canvas to better interact with the watercolor visuals and other pieces included index cards, bookmarks, and pull-away tags, keeping reminders about every part of a user's life within every part of a user's life.