Have you ever felt that the time has passed and you didn’t even notice it?

Poco-a-Poco is a tool to keep track of the most meaningful goals, through the lenses of nature. 

The one week-long project’s brief was to design, build and test a series of alternative “time telling tools” which could offer practical assistance, or teach users to individually or collectively perceive, inhabit or value time. In addition, the team’s objective was to reflect on the way we measure or represent time. More specifically, the team was looking to answer the following question:

How might we help people become more conscious of their time using nature’s life cycle as inspiration?

Poco-a-poco is designed to be used by people who want to manage their time better to fulfill their most important long-term goals in life. You start using Poco-a-poco by first syncing the device to the mobile application, setting up the most important goal and the time frame for that goal. The user then gets options of various nature’s life-cycles that fit the time-frame they selected. 

Set up the device at any location and let the life cycle hologram start to play on loop reminding the user to be conscious of how they spend their time.

The team started with some important questions: What are the things people consider important to track and why? What motivates people to fulfill their goals?

Some of the key prototyping insights were that tracking procrastination generates guilt and can be a distraction. There are many applications in the market for tracking efficiency but the main focus was to make people aware of their meaningful long term goals. These insights guided our concept from a procrastination tracking timer to a meaningful reminder of what matters the most.

The process to get to the final result involved user research, a card sorting tool, lo-fi paper mockups and conducting many user testing. This allowed the team to iterate quickly between designs moving to a higher fidelity working prototype with hologram and a detailed UI, where testers were able to experience the usage and give us final in-depth and concrete feedback.