Stellor

stellor mockup

Inspiration

"Woah, why is time going by so fast?" That was the core inspiration for our project. Chronoception is the subjective, internal, and often fluid perception of time's passage. Unlike objective clock time, chronoception encompasses how individuals experience the duration of events and is influenced by memory, attention, emotion, and environmental context. We wanted to explore how this could be tracked and leveraged to help people stop passively letting time fly by. We were also inspired by Nature. Long before mechanical clocks imposed a rigid external structure over the felt experience of a day, humans marked time by sensing the world around them: the movement of the sun, the shift of seasons, the growth that comes with age, and of course, stars. Stars in particular have been humanity's oldest interface for time. We navigate by them, mark seasons through them, and tell stories with them. They illuminate and fade, just like memories do. The name Stellor came from the collision of two ideas: the stellar, cosmic theme of stars and sky, and lore, the accumulated knowledge and story of something. We want people to be able to see their personal story unfolding star by star, moment by moment instead of letting time slip away into the blur.

What it does

Stellor turns your lived experience into a personal constellation. Moments are captured automatically through health data, photos, and listening patterns and mapped as stars onto your sky. The more present and varied your days, the brighter and denser your constellation grows. Routine leaves it dim. You can scroll back through time to relive moments star by star, get gentle nudges through a home screen widget when your sky starts to fade, and set personal goals with suggestions for experiences worth remembering. Privacy settings give you full control over what gets captured and what stays yours. The result is a living portrait of your time a mirror for how fully you're living.

How we built it

We started by mapping out user flows and defining the core features we wanted Stellor to have. From there, we built a design system with fonts, colors, spacing, things like corner radius, created components for elements like stars and buttons, and translated our flows into screens. Then we imported everything into Figma Make and brought the interactions to life through prototyping.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part was the speculative nature of the prompt. We went through a lot of directions that almost worked before landing on the constellation. We also spent a long time in the research phase, since the prompt was speculative and the possibility space was enormous. And for some of us, this was our first designathon, so we were figuring things out as we went.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of taking a concept as abstract as time perception and turning it into something tangible.

What we learned

Designing something that doesn't exist yet is fundamentally different than designing under existing systems and conventions.

What's next for Stellor

We'd love to explore the interactive and responsive side of the constellation by having it react dynamically to logged moments and emotional patterns over time. Also, we were unable to get to the social aspect of time perception, which was also an area that our survey revealed was really important in how they experienced time. Stellor could include social features like sharing constellations and moments to transform this from a personal tool into something that can be shared and felt alongside others.