Description of app

Fractals is a calming experience that allows users to set preferences for hypnotic fractal animations. They can set duration, speed, and color schemes to personalize their fractal animation. This will give them the opportunity to zone out and relax on their phone without feeling the pressure to either (a) check social media or (b) feel pressure to put their phone away.

• Inspiration
  • I go on my phone all the time when I am not actively stimulated by something, either on campus or at home. I usually end up going on social media and getting flustered about one thing or another. While I know that it may be better for me to simply not go on my phone, sometimes that is an unrealistic expectation. So, I’d love a calming little screen-time haven to go to when I’m feeling this way.
• Goal
  • I want my app to be a calming and entertaining screen alternative to repetitive scrolling through social media.  I’d like my users to have an outlet when they are feeling anxiety induced my social media but they still want to remain on their phone.
  • Also I want practice programming fractals, since I think my capstone project might involve that.

Intended audience & Problem being solved

My app is designed really for anyone who feels as though they spend too much time on their smartphone. More specifically, I am designing this with college students that are moving at high speeds without getting enough time during their routine to slow down and unplug. When college students do have a spare moment, almost always they are drawn to scroll through various social media platforms in one form or another.

It is pretty universally agreed that spending time on social media is detrimental to mental / emotional well-being, and increases stress levels. It can also be stressful for a user to completely divorce themselves from their screens. (Which is problematic in itself but still valid). So, Fractals meets those two issues in the middle. It provides a calming few minutes for the user to zone out on their phone but still keeps them away from social media.

Initial Research

• Similar apps
  • Based on some quick research into mindfulness and meditation apps, a lot of them either cost money or guiding the user through curated activities.
  • There is a wide variety of sleep aids, guided meditations, and thought exercises in a range of time spans – which is good. People are willing to commit different amounts of time to calming down.
• How is Fractals different?
  • People may not feel inspired / motivated to go through whole activities for a variety of reasons: time commitment, energy commitment, it does not appeal to them, etc.
  • Fractals lets the user select the amount of time, then all the user has to do is stare at their screen! These days, this is a very natural feeling interaction for people to have with their phones.
• Research enough to know that what you’re proposing is possible.
  • Since I love to play around with p5.js and processing, I looked into the possibility of using that in my app. Here is a tutorial for combining processing in Android Studio. I think it is possible to accomplish because the rest of my app’s interactions and programming will be fairly simple.
  • For guidance on how to build my code, I will look at p5.js tutorials for fractal art. To begin, I can build off of these two coding train videos of fractal trees and Mandelbrot circles.

Content sources

Settings that are customized by user input:

• Slider to set duration: 1 – 10min
• Radio buttons to select color scheme: ocean / desert / forest
• Radio buttons to select speed of motion: slow / medium / fast

These parameters will inform the animation, which will be on a Processing canvas!

Digital Prototype

The user controls are at the center of the interface, then when they tap “start,” the view will scroll down to show the canvas and the animation will automatically start.

Below is an Illustrator mockup of my design!