With Qu, the ultimate goal is to connect people back to their natural flows and patterns of life, and cultivate a grounded experience that enriches our lives and creates a more mindful and natural relationship with our technology. Qu is an innovative ambient technology based ecosystem designed to help you cultivate a balanced relationship with technology. Combining sound, light, scent, movement, and contextual data, Qu softly communicates and provides control over phone and digital wellbeing. It aims to awaken a greater awareness of content consumption and phone usage, giving you the ability to make intentional choices that lead to deeper joy and connection with yourself, your surroundings and others. We want to create an incredible way, and a softer approach to inspire new notions of interacting with technology, one that promotes consciousness and empowers individuals to live a life of intention and fulfillment, one that leads to more mindful consumption and brings back a piece of our humanity.

Design Team

Matt Ahrens, Prototype Lead Arjun Gupta, Research Lead Lara Federspiel, Project Manager Seth Stomberger, Visual Lead Pranshu Agarwal, UX Strategy Lead

To fully experience the richness of humanity, individuals must engage with the world around them without the constant distraction of mobile devices. Phones are not inherently bad, however the heavy usage of them distracts people from pursuing hobbies, fostering in-person relationships, frolicking around in a field, or simply just being in touch with their own minds and awareness - Being human if you will. With Qu, the ultimate goal is to connect people back to their natural flows and patterns of life, and cultivate a grounded experience that enriches our lives and creates a more mindful and natural relationship with our technology. We want to create an incredible way, and a softer approach to inspire new notions of interacting with technology, one that promotes consciousness and empowers individuals to live a life of intention and fulfillment, one that leads to more mindful consumption and brings back a piece of our humanity. Qu is a multifaceted system with a lot of intelligence behind the scenes. The Qu ecosystem has three family members: The Qu, the Mini Qus and a side app facilitator. All of these work together as an ecosystem to integrate into your daily life. Qu is backed by ambient intelligence developed through what we call the “talking phase” - Once you unbox and set up Qu, it will take up to a week of observing your phone usage and daily schedules to customize the perfect environment for your day to day life. That means there is NO set up required on the app, unless you want to customize the environment that Qu set up for you. Modes are ambient environments created for specific situations. These modes are customized to your specific needs and preferences, utilizing changing lights, scents, and sounds to transform your environment into a productive, relaxing, upbeat or inspiring space. We use modes in modern technology now, such as sleep mode, work mode, do not disturb etc. but with Qu, we are expanding beyond that. With help from Qu and the mini Qus,. the system is able to apply senses such as different lights, smells and sounds to these modes. For example, you automatically enter sleep mode at midnight, so Qu knows to turn on the orange lights, play calming rain sounds and smell like lavender. Qu helps decrease mindless technology usage by providing you with specific recommendations based on learned hobbies and goals, inspiring you to pursue your dream life.

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