YEAR:
2025
TIMELINE:
3.5 DAYS
EXPERIENCE:
PRODUCT, UX/UI
TEAM:
PRANAV CHAPARALA
RIN KIM
AASHITA VERMA
AMY ZHANG
overview.
Lumi was created for the FigBuild 2025 design-a-thon, which invited designers to design a tool that manages an imagined magical superpower meant to address a real-world struggle. Our team addressed the challenge of creative block by imagining Illuminestra, a superpower of childlike wonder that floods the mind with bursts of inspiration.
To manage Illuminestra, we designed Lumi, a handheld device paired with a wearable that captures those ideas and organizes them into a gallery. Users can browse, keep, revise, or release each idea, and adjust its tone from playful to practical. Lumi explores how speculative tools might support creativity by helping people stay in flow and shape their own imaginative thinking.
challenge.
Prompt:
Design, build, and prototype in a team using Figma according to the following prompt:
Imagine you wake up tomorrow with a superpower—a new, magical ability that helps you tackle a major challenge in your life. Maybe it’s time-stretching to balance your workload, hyper-focus to eliminate distractions, or instant skill absorption to master new things effortlessly. But every superpower needs a toolkit to help harness its full potential. Without the right tools, even the greatest powers can become overwhelming, chaotic, or sinister.
1. Identify a shared pain point—something in your daily life that feels frustrating, inefficient, or challenging.
2. Invent a superpower that would solve this problem.
3. Design a tool, platform, or system that would help you manage your superpower effectively.
Problem Statement:
As designers, we’re expected to be original, fast, and productive but we rarely give ourselves space to imagine freely. At the same time, AI is everywhere. It can generate ideas quickly, but it often makes us passive. Instead of thinking deeply or playfully, we start relying on it to do the creative work for us. As a result, many people feel stuck. Ideas feel flat. And imagination, the part that makes work feel exciting, gets lost.
Superpower:
Illuminestra, the superpower of childlike wonder, grants the ability to enter a radiant state of pure, uninhibited curiosity. Ordinary objects glow with hidden potential and your imaginations floods in like warm golden light. Colors are brighter, time feels like it stretches and folds, thoughts become play. The skepticism of adulthood melts away, the mind delights in curiosity, invents meaning, finds beauty in everything, and dares to ask “what if” without fear.
Challenges:
Too many ideas — Illuminestra feeds you with too many ideas, some not even practical. That kind of thinking, if left unshaped, can be chaotic.
concept development.
We set out to design a digital toolkit that could help users manage the imaginative intensity of Illuminestra’s childlike creativity. Our early concept centered on a product that generated cognitive remixes through unexpected combinations or reimagining existing ideas. To evoke a sense of playful nostalgia, we drew inspiration from childhood devices like Tamagotchis, Etch A Sketches, and Game Boys. The form factor was intentionally toy-like, and we incorporated a screen to allow users to clearly visualize and interact with their ideas.
results.
Lumi: an interactive handheld device that supports the creative process by helping users organize and shape their ideas into clear, usable outcomes. As ideas emerge, Lumi collects them into a structured gallery for review. Users can quickly sort through concepts by choosing to keep, refine, or discard them. A physical dial allows for real-time adjustments, shifting each idea along a spectrum from exploratory and imaginative to focused and practical. With each iteration, users gain new perspectives, enabling deeper engagement with their creative thinking. Lumi is built to support momentum in moments of creative block, bridging abstract inspiration with concrete direction.
