INTENT + CONTEXT

Graduated—but what's next?

I started this project because I wanted to build an app that feels like pure visual excitement—something that lets me stretch every design skill I learned but never really got to implement anywhere. I’m used to designing for large audiences, clear problems, and strict usability, but with this project I wanted to intentionally step away from that and ask what it would mean to build an app that exists mainly to explore who I am, how I move, and what I smell like.

Perfume is a big part of my identity: certain scents are tied to specific eras and places in my life, and fragrance holds history and emotion while leaving almost no visible trace. This app is a playground for that obsession—not a hyper-optimized daily tool, but a carefully crafted space for people who care deeply about scent, memory, and aesthetics. It’s a project I convinced two of my design friends—who also love perfume—to build with me, because it feels like a direct representation of us and the way we experience fragrance together.

‍This is my attempt to give perfume a kind of technical body: to record not just what scent I wore, but where I walked, how often, and how it felt. I see it as a way to explore how far I can push interface, motion, and data-visualization when they’re allowed to be poetic and personal, while still keeping the underlying information readable and clear. Before stepping fully into full-time work, I wanted to spend a few months making something that feels uniquely “me”—and “us”—a project that celebrates fragrance, identity, and the joy of designing an experience you’d be excited to revisit years later. Please note, this case study reflects a work in progress—not the final product. We’re refining details in real time, and the full prototype will be available soon.

EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

1
Threads

We turn perfume families and individual scents into stitched patterns on a softened self-portrait, so your longterm scent identity lives as embroidery on your face.

2
Scent Map
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We use steps, time, and loose GPS clusters to draw abstract scent trails, so you can see how often, how far, and in which “zones” you moved with a specific perfume.

3
Memory
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We log each day’s perfume, emotions, and photos into a clean calendar view, so you can quickly revisit the moments and moods attached to specific scent‍

Each scent family becomes a unique embroidery pattern; individual perfumes modulate color, density, and opacity to show which scents defined different eras of your life.

A bitmap-style grid visualizes trail density over time; filters like “Today,” “Week," and “All time” reveal your most frequented scent paths and AI-suggested cluster labels.

Colored shapes mark days with scent entries and photos; tapping a date opens a detail view with the perfume of the day, AI-extracted keywords, trail summary, and media.

IDEATION + CREATION

Walking Through Design Decisions

Google Maps vs. Plume Map

When I first thought about “scent trails,” my instinct was to lean on what already exists: a map with streets, pins, and routes—basically a softer version of Google Maps. But the more I explored it, the more it felt wrong. I didn’t want Plume to help you navigate the world; I wanted it to help you remember how it felt to move through it with a specific perfume.

PRIORITIZE ABSTRACTION, BUT NEVER AT THE COST OF LEGIBILITY. | REINTERPRET EVERYDAY TOOLS IN A WAY THAT FEELS MORE ABSTRACT AND PERSONAL.

So instead of a literal city map, I designed Plume Map as an abstract bitmap using p5.js. Each day’s steps become tiny marks on a grid, and over time those marks build into dense “scent zones” rather than precise paths. It’s less about drawing exact streets and more about revealing your scent habits — what spaces Delina, Valaya, or BR540 have quietly claimed over time.

Low density · new paths

Medium density ·
regular routes

High density ·
anchor routes

Hmmm... How to include AI

I knew I wanted to incorporate AI, but didn’t want AI to show up as a chat box or a personality. Plume already has enough quiet data (steps, dates, notes, photos, GPS) — the question I was asking myself was: where can AI make that data more readable without rewriting my story for me?‍

USE AI AS A HELPER, NOT THE NARRATOR. | PRECISION ISN'T THE GOAL.

1. AI for emotions & keywords in Memory

Daily logs can be messy or overwhelming: “walked to Westwood with Delina, sad but pretty sunset with MFK.” Instead of forcing people to tag everything manually, AI scans your text and gently pulls out the recurring pieces.

e.g. “sad but pretty sunset in Westwood” → SAD, SUNSET, WESTWOOD ‍Over time, certain words rise to the top as your main keywords for that perfume.

2. AI for naming scent clusters in Threads

AI also helps translate abstract trails into something closer to language.Behind the scenes, Plume groups movement into soft clusters (zones where you often walk with a specific scent). Instead of leaving them as cluster_1, cluster_2, etc., AI looks at:
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- where the cluster tends to start and end
- what times of day it happens most
- what notes you usually log afterward
- suggests labels like: “morning walk from home”, “evening campus loop”

Identity = Perfume = Embroidery = Data

While ideating on ways to represent identity through perfume—beyond a literal headshot—we chose embroidery as our primary language. Historically, stitching lived close to the body and signaled who you were; in Plume, each perfume family becomes its own stitch pattern, and each scent shifts the color, density, or opacity of that pattern. Over time, the embroidered face turns into a kind of scent signature: data about wear frequency, eras, and families is encoded into something that looks like textile, not a chart.

REINTERPRET EVERYDAY TOOLS IN A WAY THAT FEELS MORE ABSTRACT AND PERSONAL. | EMBROIDERY AS THE MOTIF IS A BRIDGE BETWEEN SCENT AND SELF.

Rather than a standard avatar or profile photo, I reinterpreted the “profile picture” as an embroidered self-portrait. Once you upload a headshot, Plume softens it into a monochrome background that becomes your personal embroidery cloth—a surface that always stays recognizably you, but never distracts from the stitches. As you log different perfumes over time, new stitch patterns are layered onto this cloth, slowly turning your face into a living record of your scent identity.

Designing like #DESMA (design media arts)

Even though embroidery is the core motif, I didn’t want every screen to be stitched. Each surface in Plume uses a different visual system for the same underlying data.

KEEP THE THREE SURFACES DIFFERENT, BUT CONNECTED. | PRIORITIZE ABSTRACTION, BUT NEVER AT THE COST OF LEGIBILITY.

Threads is a reinterpretation of a profile photo / profile page.
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Scent Map is a reinterpretation of a navigation map.
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Memory is a reinterpretation of a productivity calendar.
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Instead of a headshot, your “profile” is a softened portrait overlaid with embroidery. Each stitch pattern stands in for a perfume family, and the way it fills in over time becomes your scent identity.

Instead of showing roads and turn-by-turn directions, it uses a bitmap-style heat grid to focus on where your scent lives—the zones you repeatedly walk through with a specific perfume.

Instead of reminders and meetings, it highlights days you logged a scent, emotion, and photo, turning the calendar into a perfume diary rather than a scheduling tool.

The challenge was to keep these three views visually distinct but clearly related—same scents, same trails, same memories—just rendered through different lenses.

REFLECTION

Designing for Me!

This is probably the first time in a while that I’ve designed an app purely for myself. It felt really different from typical product work—freeing, but also a little scary—because there wasn’t a clear business metric or stakeholder to answer to, just my own taste and curiosity. Plume became a space where I could pull in all the tools and techniques I’ve learned at school—embroidery, bitmap experiments, motion, data-viz—and ask, “Is this actually necessary? Does this still read?” I had to keep switching between designer-brain (does this pattern communicate?) and user-brain (would I actually enjoy using this every day?).

The most meaningful part was building it with my close friends who are just as obsessed with perfume. We weren’t just “designing a feature list”; we were translating our own habits, jokes, and rituals into an interface. In the end, Plume feels less like a polished product and more like a shared artifact—a reminder that designing for yourself and the people close to you can be just as valuable as designing for millions.

A personal experiment in perfume, identity, and data visualization.