Inspiration
A lot of people struggle with time blindness. It's when you feel like you have a lot of time until suddenly, you don't. Especially as students, we see this happen all the time. Putting off assignments until the minute, underestimating how long things take, or everyone showing up late to a hangout. We also have friends who have ADHD or experience similar struggles with time blindess. That got us thinking about the idea of time being something we don't just check on a clock, but something we can actually sense internally.
Because in reality, time feels really subjective. It flies by when we're having fun, it drags on in lectures, and that gap between how time feels and how it actually passes can lead to stress and procrastination. The difference between how time feels and how it really is can cause us stress and make us put things off, and Clairos came from exploring that idea.
What it does
Clairos is a wearable device that allows users to experience a heightened sense of time. It is primarily for people with ADHD who struggle with time blindness.
It reads biometric data (heart rate variability, skin conductance, movement), behavioural patterns (how you interact with the device, how long you've been doing something), and context (upcoming calendar events) to estimate how time is feeling to you in the moment, whether it feels fast, slow or normal. When your perceived time drifts from reality, Clairos shifts your perception with haptic pulses, colour shifts, wave visuals, and nudges you with a prompt to act.
How we built it
We used FigJam for brainstorming and research, Figma Design for crafting our prototype, and FigmaMake to animate and bring our prototype to life!
Challenges we ran into
We wanted to challenge ourselves by tackling something as abstract and subjective as time, and challenge ourselves we did... Time itself is already a difficult concept to grasp, but turning it into something tangible that a device could sense, interpret, and respond to was even harder.
We actually spent a lot of our time in the ideation phase, trying to figure out how this idea could exist as a real object and experience. One of our biggest goals was making sure Clairos didn’t just become another productivity tool with reminders and alarms, but something genuinely different that helped people feel and understand time rather than just manage it, especially for those who alarms and reminders don't work for. In the end, we focused on just two aspects of time perception: temporal orientation (past, present, future) and pace perception (whether time feels fast or slow). Translating these ideas into simple, intuitive feedback (waves, colour, haptics) still took a lot of experimentation before it started to make sense as a user experience.
Built With
- aftereffects
- figma
- figmamake
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