Drift
Drift is designed for people who want to explore and experience the city without fixed paths and and in response to how places feel. Moving beyond efficiency-driven navigation, it guides you based on how you want to feel, helping you stay more attentive to your environment through environmental signals and multisensory cues.
Urban navigation systems are primarily designed to optimize time and distance, shaping how people move through cities. While effective for reaching a destination, they prioritize calculated routes over how a journey actually feels, often guiding people through environments that are crowded, noisy, or overwhelming. This creates a gap between how places are represented on maps and how they are experienced in reality.
This project focuses on people who actively explore and experience the city, such as those who enjoy wandering, traveling, or navigating unfamiliar environments. For these users, movement is not only about getting somewhere, but about how the journey unfolds:
1. Wearable Bracelet — Sensory Guidance During the walk, guidance is delivered through a wearable bracelet using haptic feedback and subtle light cues. This allows navigation to be felt rather than followed, reducing screen dependency and helping users stay more present and attentive to their surroundings.
2. Sensory-Driven Mobile App — Intent & Adaptive Navigation Before starting, users select how they want to feel from five modes — calm, breezy, wander, reset, and alive — along with the duration of their walk. The system generates routes aligned with that intent, while the app acts as secondary guidance, adapting in real time through states such as moving, lingering, and drifting.
3. EchoDrop — Reflection & Shared Experience After the walk, each journey becomes a personal memory. Through EchoDrop, users transform these into digital postcards and share them, extending individual experiences into a collective layer of memory and exploration.
By shifting navigation beyond efficiency, Drift reframes movement as an experience shaped by how users want to feel. It encourages people to move with greater awareness and intention, transforming everyday navigation into a more immersive and sensory-driven way of engaging with the city.
