sLime | Devpost

happy sLime
bored sLime
shocked sLime
sLime peek

Inspiration

We first got interested in a shared concern in our team. We constantly find ourselves engaging in habitual social media scrolling that leaves us overwhelmed and forgetting why we picked up our phone in the first place. This is especially a concern for Gen-Z people who build their social lives and careers through smartphones. While existing research addresses social media fatigue and information overload, these terms describe the consequences rather than the sensory experience of activities like mindless scrolling. Drawing on the concept of proprioception, which describes an unconscious sense of our limbs’ position and condition, we coin the term of attention proprioception that describes a sense of where our attention currently is and where we want it to be.

What it does

We then designed sLime to track this sense and influence the mindless scrolling behavior guided by the loss of this sense. Specifically, it is a phone-based system that tracks scrolling patterns, physiological indicators of emotions and stress, and non-screen time. In an app, users can adopt a virtual screen pet, make a commitment by setting their use goals, and choose preferred grounding activities. When the system detects a drop in the sense of attention proprioception, the screen pet appears and invites the users to take a screen break by doing one of the grounding activities. By completing these activities and accumulating the non-screen time, users can earn credits to keep their pets happy.

The experience

We built the prototype of sLime with Figma Make after setting up the design elements and wireframes. While the AI tools expedited the process, one challenge we faced was to select the features that really mattered among the many we wanted to include. We resolved it with multiple rounds of group discussions and interactions with Figma Make that produced many versions of the prototype. The more we worked on the prototype, the more we wanted to use this tool by ourselves. We enjoyed designing sLime a lot, and we hope you like it too!