Summary
Summary
Embedded Files
Aako is a personal memory map app build to make memory more emotional and accessable. It brings moments together in a rich spatial and emotional experience rather than a static archive. Build together using XR, place-based interaction, and small social networks as the medium, this app makes memories more than data and feel alive and meaningful again.
Time
Time
Dec 2023 - Dec 2025 (ongoing)
Role
Role
Co-founder, Product Designer, Xr Design Lead
Responsibility
Responsibility
UX research, Mobile UI Design, XR Design, Prototyping
Story
Story
The idea started from the heart of a roadtrip lover.
The founder, Yasushi, and I are friends since middle school and we will go on many roadtrips in countries. Roadtrip, or fast delivering oneself into new surrounding to alienate from the normal human city life, creates great attachment of ones’s emotion to the location. The feeling is not only from the sense of achievement, but also mixed with conquest instinct from ancestral root, freedom from escape of routine, reconnecting with nature, and more. The location thus became a strong beacon that holds complex human emotions. Similar emotion also found in one's feeling toward hometown, pilgrimage, NYC affection, American Dream, and more locational symbology.
Design Goal
Design Goal
Reimagine MEMORY as an experience that can be REVISITED and RE-FELT, not just stored.
Design a SYSTEM where moments remain CONNECTED to place, time, and emotion.
Solution
Solution
We created Aako, a geospatial platform designed for close friends that anchor moments back into the places where they were created, restoring presence, sensory connection, and emotional context.
Design Timeline
Design Timeline
This is a over two-year project. While I co-founded the app with Yasushi Oh from 0–1, this website show mostly the concept and current features. See Detail Case Study here.
What is Echo?
What is Echo?
Broswing most mainstream social media out there we figure that
No Competitors had an Actual Entity of what a POST is.
No Competitors had an Actual Entity of what a POST is.
No matter how their UI changes over time, the linear structure remains unchanged. They are composed of text and images and likes, yet missing a representation.
ECHO
So, we created Echo! Very first post entity that takes shape of a bubble with clear hierarchy of information of text, audio, and visual.
User Flow
User Flow
Features:
Features:
Immerse
Hang out with moments as life-like 3D Bubbles like time capsules.
Connect
Explore the map and swipe through moments, react with popping 3D emojis to connect beyond time and space.
Capture
< 1 min, turn moments into amazing AR Bubbles and stays exactly at where they were.
Relieve
Revisit moments through dairy that connect memories across time and place, bringing experiences back to life.
Style guide
Style guide
Page updated
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