Trace

Inspiration

Walking is one of the most accessible ways for people to stay active and reflect. However, most tracking tools reduce walking to numbers—steps, distance, and calories while overlooking the sensory and emotional qualities that shape the experience. We were inspired by the idea that a path can feel open, calm, mysterious, or vibrant depending on the environment and our body’s response. Trace was created to capture these subtle “path experiences” and help people better understand how their surroundings influence their emotions and wellbeing while walking.

What it does

Trace records and visualizes the sensory and emotional experience of walking. Instead of focusing only on quantitative metrics, Trace captures signals such as environmental sound, movement patterns, and emotional feedback to create a path experience visualization.

How we built it

First, we conducted user research to understand why people walk and what emotional needs walking fulfills. Insights revealed that walking often supports reflection, stress relief, and environmental discovery. We then developed a concept for capturing “path experience” through a combination of: mobile sensing (movement and sound), emotional tagging, environmental context data, visual data storytelling. The prototype was designed using Figma with Figma Make, where we created the interaction flow, data visualization concepts, and emotional mapping interface.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was representing subjective emotional experiences in a meaningful way. Emotions during walking are subtle and difficult to quantify, so translating them into visual signals required careful design exploration. Another challenge was balancing data collection with privacy concerns, since capturing environmental and emotional signals could involve sensitive information. We also explored how to avoid overwhelming users with too much data while still conveying the richness of the walking experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that Trace introduces a new way to think about activity tracking—shifting the focus from pure metrics to experiential understanding. Our prototype demonstrates how walking data can be transformed into intuitive visualizations such as emotional heat maps and path experience summaries. We also successfully framed walking as an interaction between body, environment, and emotion, which opens up new possibilities for designing healthier and more reflective urban experiences.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how challenging it is to design for intangible experiences like emotions and atmosphere. We also realized the importance of carefully considering ethics, privacy, and user control when working with sensory and emotional data. Most importantly, we learned that small everyday activities like walking, contain rich experiential data that traditional tracking systems often overlook.

What's next for Trace

Next, we plan to expand Trace by:

Conducting user testing during real walking sessions Improving accessibility for users with mobility or sensory needs Implementing privacy protections such as anonymization and encrypted data storage Enhancing path recommendations to help users find calmer, smoother, and less crowded walking routes

Our goal is to evolve Trace into a system that helps people discover paths that support both physical movement and emotional wellbeing.