what is weave

weave is a speculative social tool that tracks, visualizes, and heightens your latent social memory, the invisible web of people orbiting your life before you ever speak to them.

Your brain has been keeping track of faces, recurring locations, shared connections, and almost-introductions long before you're consciously aware of them. weave makes that hidden map visible.

what inspired us

Our starting question was simple: why are people hesitant to reach out?

The answer we kept landing on was uncertainty. Uncertainty creates friction, and friction creates missed connections... people who were supposed to meet, who kept almost meeting, and never quite did.

The idea hit close to home. Kimberly, one of our team members, a big extrovert who couldn't walk through a building saying hi to someone she knew, noticed she'd started forgetting names, mixing up memories between people entirely, having her wonder, "Have I run out of memory space in my brain? Was there a limit to how many faces I could remember?"

But weave isn't just for people trying to keep up with the connections they already have. It's equally for the person who just moved to a new city, walked into a new school, or joined a new community and is quietly wondering how to find their people. The person who isn't bad at socializing, they just don't know where to start. The person who can feel that their web could be bigger, richer, more alive, but can't see the threads that are already forming around them. That tension between rich social lives, the cognitive limits of maintaining them, and the desire to keep stretching your web outward into the unknown is exactly where Weave lives.

what we learned

We came into this with varying levels of Figma experience, and left with a shared understanding that prototyping is how you figure out the design. In particular, we learned about Figma Make, and being able to animate the onboarding flow and test it as a real interactive experience revealed problems that static frames never would have.

Moreover, we learned to make tradeoffs quickly, kill ideas that didn't survive contact with a working prototype, and trust the process of building something rough to find out what it should actually be. Some of our best decisions were made because we had to commit and move forward. We got comfortable with good enough for now in service of the whole.

how we built it

The design and prototype was done completely within the Figma ecosystem; Figma Design for UI and main prototype, Figma Make for animating our onboarding flow and prototyping motion, FigJam for our initial brainstorm, and Figma Slides for our presentation. (We may or may not be writing this description in the speaker notes of our slides...)

Working in Figma let us collaborate across wildly different schedules; one teammate edited slides from lecture, another fixed formatting from a Starbucks across town. We also café-hopped all weekend, switching environments whenever momentum stalled.

Our team brought complementary strengths: Matthew directed our short film, Jadden handled motion graphics and animation, Alicia led branding and illustration, and Kimberly shaped the strategic narrative and presentation; all of us, however, contributed to the brainstorming, UX, and overall design of our idea. We were lucky to each specialize in something distinct while overlapping just enough to cover each other's gaps.

The ideation phase lived almost entirely in FigJam, our messy and sprawling board that held everything: research on human senses beyond the classic five, half-formed concepts, ideas we couldn't let go of yet, and eventually the sticky notes that pointed toward weave. That board was where the team actually thought together, argued together, and slowly found the thread worth pulling.

challenges we faced

Every direction we found was genuinely interesting, from the moment you stop listening in a conversation to your own involuntary signals towards people. That itself was a problem. We had many ideas and couldn't let go of them; we disagreed and kept pivoting. What finally cut through was returning to a feeling rather than a concept. Not "what is the most novel sense to track" but "what experience do we most want someone to have?" Once we had that feeling as the anchor, every other decision got easier.

Moreover, we found designing for ambiguity without anxiety a challenge. The what-if layer of people you might know, paths that keep crossing, walks a fine line. Too prominent and it feels surveilling. Too subtle and it loses its power. We spent a lot of time asking: how blurry is blurry enough? How much do you surface about someone unknown? What language makes speculation feel like wonder rather than surveillance?

We also had to thoroughly consider security. Building something that tracks proximity and shared spaces comes with the real and serious potential for misuse.

accomplishments we're proud of

We made something we'd actually use. Weave solves something we've all personally felt, and hearing ourselves say "I wish this existed" mid-process was the best signal we could have gotten. We're also proud of how coherent the visual language stayed end to end: the shape you choose in onboarding becomes how you appear in someone else's graph, your colors bleed into your connections, every decision carries meaning. And staying entirely within the Figma ecosystem across four people and one weekend, while pulling off something that felt this complete, genuinely surprised us.

Until our paths cross,

Jadden, Alicia, Kimberly, & Matthew