M.AD
MINUSCULE ADVENTURE
Activate your senses through real-time adaptive narration + music
HCI Design | Interaction Design | Experience Design
Focus : Mental Wellbeing
Tools : IBM NodeRed (JS+Sql) | Figma | Adobe PremierePro
12 Weeks | 2020
Team Members : Jeremy Hulse | Joy Zhang | Lisa Aoyama
Role : UX Architect | UX Researcher | Industrial (Hardware) Designer
MINUSCULE ADVENTURE (M.AD) transforms an ordinary neighborhood walk into a dynamic, immersive audio adventure. Narration and music are generated in real time and adapt to your environment, creating a unique experience every day.
This project addresses the growing need for urban dwellers to engage their senses and support mental wellbeing. With increasing screen time and remote work, city residents face higher risks of digital fatigue—M.AD offers a playful, mindful way to reconnect with their surroundings.
The platform combines intelligent software with immersive hardware.
The software generates real-time, personalized narration and adaptive music using inputs like GPS, weather, time, and user preferences. The hardware uses bone-conduction audio to layer this experience onto the natural soundscape, and its sensor-equipped, connected earpieces enable a fully screen-free voice interface.
CONTEXT + IMPACT
OUR SOLUTION
INSPIRATION + IDEATION
As daily life becomes increasingly digital and virtual, reconnecting with our physical surroundings is crucial for mindfulness and mental wellbeing. Drawing on phenomenology, MINUSCULE ADVENTURES invites users to re-engage with their lifeworlds by amplifying sensory awareness—turning ordinary walks into meaningful, immersive experiences.
DESIGN HYPOTHESIS
Miniscule Adventures help us to live mindfully, improving our mental wellbeing
RESEARCH + DEVELOPMENT
KEY USERS
Urban Dwellers in
Sensorially Deprived
Environments
We started by interviewing experts and extreme users experiencing sensory deprivation, gaining insight into their most significant challenges and the strategies they use to adapt and cope.
EXPERTS CONSULTED
CO-DESIGN WORKSHOP
We ran a co-design workshop with 17 work-from-home users (ages 20–45) to gather real-world insights and bring potential users into the process from the start. Since the project centers on subjective experience, early involvement was key. Participants also designed their own ideal Minuscule Adventure.
USER TESTING + EXPERIMENTS
Our Validation Process was inspired by both Mindfulness Therapy and Psychedelic Therapy and we used both the industry standard MAAS (Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale) and 11D-ASC (Altered State of Consciousness) surveys to conduct our user testing. This systematic surveying allowed us to gather qualitative and quantitative analysis in conjunction with our user interviews.
EXPERIMENT I
FOCUS ON
- Immersive Experience
- Personalization
EXPERIMENT II
FOCUS ON
- Autonomous Experience
- User Generated Content
EXPERIMENT III
FOCUS ON
- User Customization
- User Reflection
Users showed diverse comfort levels and preferences, so insights from Experiments I and II made it clear that the experience needed to be customizable. We developed a four-tier spectrum—from Total Immersion to Total Autonomy—mixing narration and thematic prompts in different ways.
Testing Tier 3 in Experiment III led to measurable increases in Mindfulness and Psychedelic Research survey scores, confirming that the experience helped users slow down, become more present, and activate their senses.
PROTOYPING + MVP
HARDWARE
The hardware platform is developed to unplug from the screens with a self-contained microprocessor, its own internet connectivity, GPS tracking and memory card. Activate the senses using the earpieces, with embedded accelerometers and microphones in both to generate hyper live inputs. The bone conduction technology allows the user to still hear all ambient sounds. The earpieces will be worn, and the case will be kept in the pocket during the adventure.
SOFTWARE
The current MVP, built on IBM Node-RED (JS + SQL), uses geo-tagged narration and music stitched together live in real time. The long-term goal is to evolve this into a fully autogenerated system that assembles adaptive narration and music based on GPS, weather, time of day, and sensor data (accelerometers, microphones) captured through the hardware platform.
UX JOURNEY
Choose from four tiers of immersion—from a minimal themed walk to a fully narrated experience—with adaptive music added at the higher levels.
