PHORAE
The light of your social life.
Skills: Product Design, UX/UI, Branding, Photography
Role: Designer, Researcher
Team: Max Reisner, Savannah Alter, Zach Larson, Joseph Moser
Context: Stanford University, 2024, Advanced Product Design Capstone
WHAT IS PHORAE?
PHORAE Spark is a device designed for people to connect in the real world — a wearable light for discovering mutual friends.
Spark has two functions:
[1] Its blue light glows when you and a stranger have a mutual friend.
[2] Its purple light brightens when an added friend is nearby, leading you to more frequent run-ins.
Our target audience was Stanford students seeking new friends. Through user interviews, we discovered that people craved connection, but did not want to use friend-making apps like Bumble BFF or existing digital solutions that required endless swiping. Thus, we decided to make a physical product to spark initial contact between strangers, but leave much of the conversation up to the user, in-person, in order to maintain a feeling of organic connection.
WE DESIGNED + PROTOTYPED 20 DEVICES AT STANFORD
LOGO DESIGN + MEANING
The logo represents Phorae’s driving idea. Through every friendship, you are introduced to someone else’s world; as a result, your own world expands.
Every person is a node. You meet the friends of your friends; this goes on and on with many degrees of connection until you realize just how intertwined the world really is.
This becomes an endlessly expanding network. Spark makes this visible in the real world.
APP
The Phorae app passively notifies users when someone in their physical vicinity shares a mutual friend or connection from their contacts, such as school alumni or other custom lists.
Unlike traditional friend-making apps that require constant swiping, browsing, and in-app messaging, Phorae encourages joyful, serendipitous in-person discovery with simple notifications. This enables more organic conversations and potential new friendships, and requires minimal time within the app.
SOCIAL / COMMUNICATION ASSETS
