memento

Story

We chose to digitize the experience of traveling, not just as a physical journey, but as a personal and sensory-rich process of memory-making. Traveling is one of the most tangible, vivid human experiences. It engages all the senses: the places you walk through, the sights you see, the sounds, the little moments you want to remember. But often, those memories are scattered, some in your camera roll, some in notes, and some lost altogether. We wanted to capture the emotional and spatial story of a trip in one place. That led us to building memento, an app that traces your journey and lets you pin memories (photos, notes, reflections) directly to the places you visited. By the end of a trip, you’re left with a visual memory map, something you can revisit and feel all over again. We chose this experience because it’s both universally relatable and personally meaningful, and there’s currently no intuitive, all-in-one way to preserve the full picture of a travel experience: the where, the what, and the why.

Inspiration

We were inspired by platforms like Google Timeline for its ability to track movement passively, and VSCO for its minimalist, but compelling visual storytelling. We wanted to merge these ideas into a single app that doesn’t just show where you’ve been, but why it mattered— turning travel into something you can look back on, not just through photos/a journal, but through a story of feeling.

What It Does

Memento is a consolidated, intuitive app designed to help travelers memorialize a specific trip. It would passively track your location as you explore, and allow you to pin photos and notes to real-world locations. At the end of your journey, Memento transforms all of this into a memento playback a digital keepsake that helps you revisit not just where you were, but what you felt.

How We Built It

Procreate - for sketches
Figma - for wireframes, collaborative work, high-fidelity prototyping, animations... all the Figma things
Photoshop, Illustrator - for creating vector images and logos
Canva - slidedeck

Challenges

We were a bit overly ambitious... We had a strong vision, but underestimated how much we could realistically build in the time we had and struggled to figure out logistics effectively. But with that, we definitely pushed through and stayed up all night (Ben and Kyuhong until 7AM PST and Emily until 10AM EST!), working over 15 hours straight to bring the idea to life. It was tough, but rewarding!!!

Accomplishments/What We’re Proud of

We’re proud of our design, our aesthetic vision, and our ability to work collaboratively under pressure. We all brought the energy and kept each other motivated late into the night and stayed dedicated throughout the whole process. But more than that, we’re proud of (first of all, completing something) and creating an app that feels thoughtful, and personal to us— something that could actually mean something to others.

What We Learned

We learned how to make purposeful design and feature choices that support a minimalist, emotional interface. We picked up nuanced Figma techniques, improved our collaborative workflows, and sharpened our eye for clean user flows and visual hierarchy. We also learned a lot about how far we can push ourselves when we believe in the idea.