A digital companion that adapts to your attention
#Speculative
Nov 2025
Collaborated with Erina Suzuki, Suebin Moon, Jonas Chen
Most productivity tools help you manage your time: timers, reminders, blockers. Very few help you understand how your attention actually moves throughout the day.
We wanted to explore what it might look like if the interface responded to that instead of leaving it all to the user.
Still is a focus companion that uses behavioural signals, such as interaction speed and browsing patterns, to estimate changes in attention. Instead of nagging you to take a break, it quietly reshapes the digital environment around you.
During Deep Work, motion slows and the interface becomes quieter. Later in the day, distracting apps gradually dim to gently nudge you toward rest. The goal is not to make you faster. It is to help you notice and follow your own attention rhythms.
Still works in a simple loop: it reads behavioural signals, estimates the user's attention state, and adjusts the digital environment in response.
Two pieces work together. A mobile app lets users set up and customise what "Deep Work" and "Digital Sunset" feel like, while a browser extension reads interaction speed, browsing activity, and other behavioural signals in the background, then adjusts the interface in real time.
The hardest part was making the experience feel gentle rather than controlling. A lot of focus tools rely on hard blocks and timers, which can feel punishing. We wanted Still to feel more like a quiet nudge than a rule being enforced.
It also shifted how we thought about the problem, from optimising productivity to building awareness around attention. Instead of asking people to change their habits directly, Still explores what happens when the environment does some of the adjusting.
Explore richer ways of estimating changes in attention and how the experience could adapt to individual patterns over time.
