Project Scope: Submission to Rice Designathon 2025

Rice Designathon is an annual three-day virtual event that brings student designers together to build innovative, user-centered solutions in a hackathon-style format. My team and I won 1st Place Overall out of 110 teams through reimagining digital journaling as a hunter-gatherer process!

My role in this project was to ideate and design a product for our submission, as well as build a design system and cohesive UI for our app.

Since the prompt was vague, I began ideating by splitting the prompt into two parts: what being human meant to me, and then AI. I created a mind map and wrote down whatever I associated with both of the phrases to get some ideas flowing.

I shared this map with the rest of my team and together we began to ideate. We were very inspired by facets of emotions, introspection, and gratitude – things that made us inherently human.

After hours of discussion, we honed our ideas into a single line: being human is to experience life as it unfolds — to hear, see, and think in the moment. Journaling as an activity encapsulated this notion for us.

To research what the general sentiment toward journaling was, my teammates drafted a user survey. We received 35 responses over an hour, and conducted 5 interviews with the following insights:

Many respondents noted that a major advantage of digital journals is their ability to combine photos, audio, and text in one place.

My teammate Bao conducted a competitive analysis on popular journaling apps to see what features they had, and see if we could identify any gaps in the existing market.

We spent the entirety of our first day ideating and honing – I believe that a strong idea and its underlying values will create strong design naturally. Consolidating our research, we defined a central product vision for our app:

1. Reduce User Friction, Less Work
   Journaling should be so effortless that the activation of the task should require minimal energy.
2. Flexible and Adaptive
   The journal should adapt to the user’s preferences, not the other way around.
3. Natural, Motivating, and Playful
   If the pressure of making journaling a "daily habit" is discouraging users, we want remove that, and any other obstacles (means-end analysis).

We named our app 'Capsule,' inspired by time capsules and the assorted, random artifacts of time they contain within.

I was tasked with creating the design system. My team and I assembled a moodboard of design references we liked, and I sketched a few logo concepts. I fused the ideas of a capsule shape with a message icon, and made a few variations.

Our favorite was the yellow iteration, because it felt warm, inviting, and joyful to us. We later changed it to orange for higher contrast.

With our short timeframe, we decided that it would be best to jump directly into creating mid-fis and hi-fis, and then shape the design system along the way. I picked 'Plus Jakarta Sans' as our app typeface due to its round, friendly, and geometric look, which worked with our characters and UI design ideas.

My mid-fis mostly consisted of playing around with different layouts and experimenting with component design to see what worked most seamlessly with other existing design elements. I continuously sent my team updates with where I was at and asked for their thoughts and inputs on my design choices.

After 17 hours of designing, the next morning we were ready to submit by the deadline. After submission, we all had plans scheduled so we logged off. When Rice announced their 8 finalists four hours later, we were extremely surprised to have been chosen – the submission gallery had so many creative ideas, with a few also journaling centric – we weren't sure if our idea or execution would stand out.

I called an Uber from my roommate's birthday lunch, and rushed home to work on the slides. Two of my teammates were not available, so Mary and I worked quickly to prepare a deck in thirty minutes. However, Mary soon had to leave to commute back to her university.

Despite all the chaos, moments of self-doubt, and uncertainty, our team won 1st place! The judges and organizers commended my storytelling and presentation, which was really nice to hear as an introvert. This experience reinforced my belief in intentional design and story. 🌞