Welcome to
Life As a Constellation

Overview

We’ve analyzed and charted the memories of a variety of professionals, educators, and mentors. Their life paths are as messy as yours, but—like stars in the night sky—they can be organized into constellations that tell your life story. We hope that exploring their life paths will empower you to achieve your dreams with less uncertainty and more confidence.

Duration

4 Weeks

Software

Figma

Team

4 Members including myself

As a team, we equally worked on everything together. This project taught all of us how important collaboration is.

Why did we do this?

As up and coming designers we were curious as to why other designers decided to become designers themself and what life situations brought them to where they are today. We chose the concept of constellations because everyones lives are different and we wanted to show what their stars looked like.

Exploratory Research

Research Themes

How education, socioeconomic status, and social determinants impact health.
How economic factors impact mortality.
How location and surrounding factors impact success.
How an individual over time changes.
How obstacles can be opportunities.

3 Personal Life Maps

We mapped out our own lives to self-reflect in order to help us understand ourselves before creating questions for others in our interviews.

Whiteboarding

Takeaways

Your decisions have magnitude and direction.
You have the opportunity 
to alter your future with the decisions you make.
We decided on the concept of a “life vector”—a chronological examination of the forces that affect one’s life and the consequence of one’s decisions.

Script & Template

We brainstormed both a selection of STEEP questions from our spreadsheet and a layout template to organize the answers from our interview with sticky notes, both physically on paper and digitally using a FigJam file.

Interviewing

63 Generated Questions

Meant To:

1. Probe memory
2. Start conversations
3. Encourage introspection

Organized By:

1. Social
2. Technological
3. Economic
4. Environmental
5. Personal

Coding

Themes:

1. Influences into design
2. Professional experience
3. Obstacles
4. Takeaways from obstacles
5. Personal
6. Successes

Interviewing

White boarding/Low-fi

We brainstormed what the best sort of map layout for our life vector prototype should be in order to show our answers in an interactive, comparative configuration.

White boarding/Low-fi

"Looking at successful conventions of interactive maps, we started iterating on a model inspired from celestial navigation—one of the first ways humans discovered their place in the universe."

The Prototype

Features

List:

1. Onboarding
2. Legend and wayfinding
3. Feedback cues
4. Hierarchy and focus
5. Color and value

View Prototype

Prototype Link

The Tutorial

We designed a multistep tutorial, to ensure that the user has a complete understanding of how to use the constellation.

We made sure that the guide was always available in case of confusion.

Gaze Up at the Stars

As the user navigates, clicking on different stars. Moments of that person's life and what made them who they are today begin to populate the screen.

Conclusion

The Next Steps

1. User testing
2. Filler feature
3. Minimap
4. Menu navigation
5. User created constellations
6. Story chains
7. Submit your own constellation
8. Continue research 
to include more designers.
9. Hand off to developers.

What we Learned

1. How to collaborate 
with different work styles
2. More powerful ways 
to prototype an idea.
3. More genuine and intimate ways to do research
4. Ensuring you guide questions properly to get an effective interview.
5. Systemic thinking helps unify the project and saves time on iteration.