sLime

Answering to the prompt we're given, designing a tool that tracks, measures, visualizes or quantifies an aspect of human sensory experience, our team started with a broad, fuzzy problem: people scroll mindlessly and feel bad about it. Existing tools address this with screen-time limits and app blockers, which feel punitive and get disabled. I pushed our team to stay upstream of that framing and ask a harder question: what is actually happening, sensorially, in the moment someone loses themselves in a scroll? That question led us to coin attention proprioception — a person's intuitive sense of where their attention currently is and whether it's where they want it to be. That conceptual clarity shaped every design decision that followed.

The other thing I kept pushing on: analytics dashboards were the obvious solution, and I didn't trust that. Our conversations with friends made clear that people already know they scroll too much. More information doesn't close the gap between knowing and changing. What does? Feeling responsible for something. A screen pet that visibly suffers when you doom-scroll — and thrives when you put the phone down — creates an emotional loop that a usage graph never could. That conviction drove us toward the pet over the dashboard at every fork in the road.

The key insight from our need-finding conversations was that people aren't looking for restriction. Every friend I talked to had tried screen-time limits at some point. Most had disabled them within a week. The friction felt punitive rather than supportive. What they wanted was something that understood why they were on their phone and helped them stay in relationship with that intention without making the phone feel like the enemy.

The existing vocabulary around this issue, social media fatigue, doomscrolling, information overload, all describes the consequences. None of it gets at the mechanism: what is happening, in real time, that makes the scroll feel so uncontrollable?

In one of our early whiteboard sessions, we mapped the problem space broadly: FOMO and phantom notifications pulling you in, infinite scroll trapping you, a growing sense that life and work are fully mediated by screens, and a gradual disconnection from the physical world. What connected all of these branches was a loss of self-awareness inside the experience itself. You don't notice you've been scrolling, you just surface from it.

This led me to a connection with proprioception, the body's unconscious sense of its own position and movement in space. I proposed that attention might work analogously: there's a felt sense of where your attention is, why it's there, and whether it's aligned with what you actually want to be doing. When that sense is intact, you pick up your phone with a purpose and put it down when that purpose is complete. When it erodes, you lose the thread entirely.

We called this attention proprioception, and naming it changed everything. It gave us a precise design target. We couldn't measure it directly — but we identified two proxies that reliably co-occur with its loss:

• Behavioral signals: rapid scrolling through unfinished videos, compulsive app-switching, looping through the same content
• Physiological signals: elevated heart rate variability and electrodermal activity, measurable through a paired wearable

One constraint we hit directly was iOS's restriction on third-party overlays across other apps. Having the pet walk across your TikTok feed mid-scroll, our most evocative intervention concept, runs into platform-level sandboxing that makes true cross-app overlays unavailable to most developers. We didn't want to design around a technical fiction. The near-term workaround is scoping the overlay to sLime's own in-app experience; but the more interesting path we identified is the Dynamic Island. On supported iPhones, the Dynamic Island is a persistent, system-sanctioned surface that lives above any app, exactly the kind of ambient presence sLime needs to tap you on the shoulder without taking over your screen. A pet that quietly pulses in the Dynamic Island when your scroll patterns spike, then expands with a prompt when things escalate, stays non-intrusive while remaining visible. That's the direction we'd pursue in a next iteration.