EARLY AI EXPERIMENTS
I explored with AI prototyping tools like Figma Make and Replit, using gamification and a literal “conversation room” to make chats feel active and tangible. But the ideas were too heavy and distracting. These tests helped me realize the system needed to be spatial but not literal.
DEVELOPMENT
Later, I experimented with ways to visualize conversation context more abstractly. I explored how variations in color, scale, and typographic weight could represent emotional tones, intensity, and shifts in mood over time. These prototypes tested different mappings—bars, grids, blocks, and expressive text layouts—to understand how emotion could be surfaced without relying on literal rooms or gamified elements. This phase helped me identify the visual language and semantic structures that would later support a more fluid, spatial interpretation of conversation memory.
FINAL DESIGN
Noto Sans provides a clear, flexible typographic voice that can scale from subtle metadata to expressive, oversized topic words.
A violet-based palette creates a calm, atmospheric canvas that supports depth, contrast, and the project’s memory-focused tone.
Bright accent colors give each topic a distinct visual identity, making emotional and thematic patterns instantly recognizable across the interface.
Simple, geometric icons pair with each topic as semantic anchors, scaling cleanly from small tags to dense visual clusters.
Every friend becomes a visual profile built from your shared conversation history—
where color bars, streaks, and topic patterns reveal the emotional tone of the relationship at a glance.
The moment of sending a message and watching the system update in real time—
AI analyzes tone, assigns topic color, and integrates the message into the spatial display without relying on a scrolling feed.
This reveals how AI-generated tags surface alongside messages, forming topic clusters that grow, shift,
and reorganize as the conversation evolves, turning the dialogue into a navigable semantic map.
New connections enters the system, immediately generates a lightweight profile that begins
tracking topics, emotional tones, and conversational patterns as soon as the first messages are exchanged.
REFLECTION: WHAT AI CHANGED
Working with AI fundamentally reshaped my design process. It expanded the range of prototypes I could explore in a short amount of time and allowed me to test unconventional metaphors—rooms, clusters, maps—long before committing to a direction. AI shifted my role from drawing individual screens to designing an underlying system of meaning, where data, context, and emotional tone all play structural roles.
This project also made me rethink what chat is: not just a stream of messages, but a form of shared memory. It pushed me to see digital presence as something spatial rather than linear, and conversations as relationships that accumulate texture over time. I came away understanding that interfaces can hold emotional history—not just display text—and that AI can help reveal the structure beneath our relationships without overwhelming the human experience.
WHAT'S NEXT
I plan to explore how this system could adapt to group conversations, long-term relationship timelines, and richer emotional modeling. I’m also interested in building an interactive prototype that tests how people navigate conversational memory in real time, and how AI might surface patterns or reminders that support healthier, more intentional communication.