Field Notes 3/9/26
Over the weekend I joined in FigBuild 2026 — a nationwide Figma Make design-a-thon for students. Together, Lydia Chau, Olivia Stenerson, and I experimented around the speculative design prompt of designing the next generation of quantified-self tools to measure an intangible, invisible, or previously unmeasurable aspect of the human sensory experience.
We decided to explore the sense of community. Loneliness is one of the defining health crises of our time — yet it remains almost entirely invisible. According to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1 in 5 adults studied reported serious feelings of loneliness and 65% of those affected feel fundamentally separate from the world around them. Additionally, according to the American Medical Association, social isolation raises the risk of serious health conditions — like heart disease, stroke, diabetes and dementia — by more than 25%.
We designed Nebula to sense the strength of your human connections, your emotional capacity, and the vitality of your community — and turns it to opportunities for small, timely moments of human connection. At its core, Nebula gives users a living map of their social health. It surfaces a visual portrait of connection strength across different relationships and communities, detects when that vitality is fading, and responds with gentle, actionable nudges — a prompt to reach out to someone specific, a nearby community event worth attending, or a simple micro-action that takes under a minute.
Read more about our project on Devpost: https://lnkd.in/gyCtE4ag
Over the weekend I joined in FigBuild 2026 — a nationwide Figma Make design-a-thon for students. Together, Lydia Chau, Olivia Stenerson, and I experimented around the speculative design prompt of designing the next generation of quantified-self tools to measure an intangible, invisible, or previously unmeasurable aspect of the human sensory experience.
We decided to explore the sense of community. Loneliness is one of the defining health crises of our time — yet it remains almost entirely invisible. According to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1 in 5 adults studied reported serious feelings of loneliness and 65% of those affected feel fundamentally separate from the world around them. Additionally, according to the American Medical Association, social isolation raises the risk of serious health conditions — like heart disease, stroke, diabetes and dementia — by more than 25%.
We designed Nebula to sense the strength of your human connections, your emotional capacity, and the vitality of your community — and turns it to opportunities for small, timely moments of human connection. At its core, Nebula gives users a living map of their social health. It surfaces a visual portrait of connection strength across different relationships and communities, detects when that vitality is fading, and responds with gentle, actionable nudges — a prompt to reach out to someone specific, a nearby community event worth attending, or a simple micro-action that takes under a minute.
Read more about our project on Devpost: https://lnkd.in/gyCtE4ag
