A Gentle Timekeeper for Shared Spaces

Linee (Italian for “Lines”) is a clock and daily planner designed for people sharing a space. It allows you and your housemates to visualize the day and set gentle nudges to indicate when something is happening. With an intentionally low-fidelity interface, Linee isn't about managing time perfectly, but building shared meaning, presence and cooperation in daily life.
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Our team collaborated closely on ideating, prototyping, and refining the core interactions through user testing. I took the lead on storyboarding, and on designing, iterating, and assembling Linee’s body to fit the internal components.

Skills

Physical Prototyping, Physical Computing, User Testing

Course

Tangible User Interfaces, CIID
2 weeks, Feb 2025

Instructors

Massimo Banzi

Pierluigi Dalla Rossa

Jose Chavarria

Team

Chokchey Cappai

Wayne Kim

Video by Chokchey Cappai

Helping housemates stay in sync

Our brief was to design a product that fosters togetherness in shared spaces. For people with busy schedules, home is often a sanctuary—but sharing that space means finding ways to coordinate. We first imagined Linee as a way to let housemates know when you'd be in the kitchen, using the shower, or home from work.

Linee is designed to be a good roommate—discrete but present.

Marking time, not managing it

Linee isn’t meant to replace your calendar app. Instead of precise scheduling, it supports the casual comings and goings of a shared home. Press a wooden time block to mark an event—when the needle reaches it, the block pops up with a quiet knock, creating a gentle moment of recognition.

Fostering a shared language

Linee’s low-fidelity interface invites housemates to create a unique shared language around it, leaving the details open for conversation. For added context, writable magnetic tiles can be placed along the timeline with notes, symbols, or reminders.

Iterating on the interactions

Over the first few days, we created dozens of prototypes of the hour blocks, seeing how subtle changes in their form factor would lend themselves to different interactions. After testing with classmates, we found that a protruding notch on the top of each block afforded pushing down and slightly in, allowing them to either engage or disengage the blocks.

Storyboarding and bodystorming with cardboard, rubberbands and wooden skewers.

Testing out different interactions and form factors with confused users.

Under the hood

Linee runs on a WiFi-connected Arduino, using a stepper motor and belt to move a small “flipper” mechanism across the timeline, popping up blocks as it passes them. We calculated it takes 2,200 motor steps to move across the full width of the track. At the end, it hits a switch and reverses direction. When powered on, Linee gets the local time, positions itself accordingly, and continues at the speed of time, completing one pass every 24 hours.

"It worked!"

The moment that the motor finally popped up a tile by itself.

Prototyping lessons:
Just put it in the box

One of the biggest takeaways came during physical prototyping: "just put it in the box." Many practical challenges—like component fit and material strength—only became clear once we assembled the whole thing in near-final form. Building taught us what sketches or partial prototypes couldn’t.