PHORAE
Illuminating unseen connections.
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 was my Senior Design Capstone project, created in response to rising levels of loneliness and social isolation on campuses and in urban environments. Through in- depth interviews, we discovered that students and recent graduates craved connections that felt spontaneous rather than overly mediated.
Incorporating research findings, we designed Phorae Spark: a wearable light created to spark initial contact between strangers, while leaving much of the conversation open-ended. The device makes social proximity visible: its blue light glows when two nearby users share a mutual friend, and its purple light brightens as existing friends move closer —leading to more frequent run-ins.
Phorae, pronounced “foray” and derived from siphonophorae, references organisms composed of interconnected parts, representing the driving idea that social connections expand through overlapping networks and nodes.
WE DESIGNED + PROTOTYPED 20 DEVICES AT STANFORD
Circuit boards 🪼
Dorm soldering setup
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, which Spark makes visible in the real world.
APP
After completing the capstone project, I independently designed a prototype for a digital app to further explore the concept. 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 swiping and browsing, Phorae is a simple digital experience that enables serendipitous in-person discovery.
SOCIAL / COMMUNICATION ASSETS
