Drift

(

(

5

5

)

)

Drift is an Apple Watch + iPhone experience that tracks chronoception targeted for people with ADHD. Collaborative project for FigBuild 2026.

TIMELINE

March 2026 (3-day design sprint)

ROLE

Lead Designer

Design Engineer

TOOLS

Figma

Figma Make

Claude

Claude Code

TEAM
TEAM

Christian Lee

/

Overview

A speculative tool that makes time perception visible for ADHD minds.

Drift tracks chronoception, your internal sense of time passing, and shows you patterns no clock can. We built it over a 3-day weekend sprint for FigBuild 2026, a student design competition Figma for Education runs for university students across the US, Canada, India, and Australia, with $30,000 in prizes judged by designers from Meta, Google Labs, YouTube, Spotify, Microsoft, and Patreon. The goal we set: design for a sense everyone has but no product has ever measured.

We led the end-to-end design of a cohesive hardware-integrated ecosystem from scratch, focusing on democratizing home automation for mass-market users.

/

Overview

A speculative tool that makes time perception visible for ADHD minds.

Drift tracks chronoception, your internal sense of time passing, and shows you patterns no clock can. We built it over a 3-day weekend sprint for FigBuild 2026, a student design competition Figma for Education runs for university students across the US, Canada, India, and Australia, with $30,000 in prizes judged by designers from Meta, Google Labs, YouTube, Spotify, Microsoft, and Patreon. The goal we set: design for a sense everyone has but no product has ever measured.

/

The problem

Every health app tracks something external. None track how time feels.

Health apps track steps, heart rate, sleep, all external. But nothing tracks the one thing that shapes how a day actually feels: your perception of time. For people with ADHD, time blindness, the inability to feel how time passes, affects over 5% of adults worldwide, and no existing tool addresses it. Timers assume you'll hear them. Calendars assume you can feel a deadline. Productivity apps assume your internal clock works. For ADHD brains that assumption is broken, so we chose chronoception as our focus: the internal clock the brain assembles from dopamine, attention, emotion, and memory, which distorts harder and less predictably in ADHD minds and has never been measured.

We led the end-to-end design of a cohesive hardware-integrated ecosystem from scratch, focusing on democratizing home automation for mass-market users.

/

Process: the framework

Three temporal states, and none of them is good or bad.

Drift tracks three states, each with its own color. Flow (Indigo) is when time compresses and hours feel like minutes; for ADHD this is where hyperfocus lives, powerful but sometimes a trap, since eight hours lost in Flow can mean missed meals and missed sleep. Neutral (Sage) is when time feels accurate and the clock matches your perception. Drag (Amber) is when time stretches and minutes feel like hours, but a slow, peaceful morning in Drag is restorative, not a failure. The core principle: Drift is a mirror, not a scorecard. It shows you your time and trusts you to decide what it means.

/

Process: how it works

Silent sensing all day, an honest mirror at night.

The Apple Watch already captures what Drift needs. We mapped four biometric signals, HRV, heart rate, movement, and wrist raises, to temporal states and applied research-backed multipliers: Flow compresses time by 0.5 to 0.7x, Drag stretches it by 1.3 to 1.8x. Quick two-second prompts on the Watch calibrate each person's model over time, and the Watch runs quietly all day with a complication showing Flow time at a glance. The key intervention is gentle: after 3-plus hours of sustained Flow, a soft haptic nudge says "You've been locked in for 3 hours. It's 10:24 PM." The iPhone is the evening mirror, open Drift at night and your day is already there ("Today felt like 5 hrs 48 min. Drift tracked 9 hours"), with a state chart that lays your day out as swim lanes against your calendar, plus insight cards. A journal that writes itself.

We led the end-to-end design of a cohesive hardware-integrated ecosystem from scratch, focusing on democratizing home automation for mass-market users.

/

Process: what changes for real people

Three users, three things Drift actually fixes.

A speculative tool that makes time perception visible for ADHD minds.

Jamie, 24, a software engineer, falls into the hyperfocus trap: 3.5 hours of coding after dinner vanish, feeling like 45 minutes, until Drift nudges at the 3-hour mark and, over weeks, helps Jamie spot the pattern and set a 9 PM boundary. Alex, 28, a grad student, faces the medication curve: Drift reveals their Flow crashing at 2 PM daily, so they bring the Trends data to their psychiatrist and adjust timing together. Sam, 21, a college junior, lives the deadline illusion: a paper due Friday feels like "plenty of time" on Monday until Drift reframes it as "You have 16 hours of Flow left before Friday," and the deadline finally feels real.

/

Reflection / outcomes

The hardest problem was philosophical, and the answer was restraint.

A speculative tool that makes time perception visible for ADHD minds.

Our biggest challenge wasn't technical, it was philosophical. We started assuming Flow was "good" and Drag was "bad," but the research, including Csikszentmihalyi's own warnings about flow addiction, flipped that framing completely. Designing for ADHD users whose experience we don't share added another layer: everyone we talked to had different symptoms at different strengths, so there was no single user to design for, and the biometric sensing model was our answer to staying accurate without nagging people who won't respond to constant prompts. The most important lesson was restraint: no real-time state display (it prevents obsessive checking), no scores or streaks (they cause shame spirals), evening reflection only, all data on-device, no social features, and a pause mode for grief or overwhelm. Designing for time blindness means designing for vulnerability, and we took that seriously.

OTHER

PROJECTS

Get in touch