FLOW

😥 What is this traffic jam in my head?

Picture this: you're seated at your desk with a coffee, just starting to get into the flow of things. A soft ping comes from your phone. You've placed it across the room, but the notification tickles the back of your brain. You do your best to ignore it. It works for a few moments, but then everything else comes trickling in. A firetruck driving by outside steals a bit of your attention first, and then you notice your coffee is getting cold (you should probably warm it up), and now that you think about it, you should probably pick up the phone and see who's texting.

And just like that, your flow is gone.

Modern life constantly fragments our attention. We experience this as mental clutter: thoughts colliding and tangling in our limited working memory. But we have no way to see when our attention becomes overloaded.

What if we could?

⛲️ Visualizing human attention

We often feel when our attention is scattered, but we can’t see how it moves. Flow explores a new sense: cognitive congestion, the invisible traffic of thoughts competing for our limited working memory.

A huge part of our project, and the biggest challenge, was figuring out how to represent attention and consciousness in pixel format.

To gather ideas, we asked our friends a simple question:

If you were to create a piece of artwork visualizing your attention throughout a day, what shapes and features would it have?

Surprisingly, many described rivers, loops, or rays of light that split, merge, and tangle over time.

This inspired Flow’s visual language: attention represented as moving streams, where crossings indicate context switching and density represents cognitive congestion.

🌊 Designing Flow

From this metaphor we designed Flow, a tool that visualizes the movement of attention throughout the day.

Flow has three core features:

🎥 Live visualization.
Attention appears as flowing streams that reveal when focus is clear and when mental congestion builds.

⚠️ Watch nudges.
When congestion becomes high, Flow gently suggests a pause or reset.

🧐 Pattern insights.
Day and month views help users discover long-term patterns that fragment their focus.

🧠 Metacognition and the real big picture

Thinking about thinking makes us better thinkers.

Advances in neuroscience, wearable sensors, and behavioral modeling are beginning to reveal patterns in how our attention shifts and fragments.

Our project is ultimately uses this to promote metacognition, an awareness of our own thinking processes. While our ideas are purely speculative, Flow explores how future interfaces might translate invisible concepts like thought and attention into intuitive visual cues.

Built With

• figma