In an Interactive Design class, I was given an assignment to design a new user interface metaphor. I find my to do list very stressful sometimes, and a zen garden is a very good destressing tool. They both revolve around creating and then removing marks and appeasing the user’s cleaning impulse, so I wondered if they could be combined to create a to do list that would offer a calming break from work. My goal was to translate the satisfaction of removing an item from a to do list into the satisfaction of making a beautiful, temporary mark, without compromising functionality.
The main difference between a to do list and a space like a zen garden is that a to do list needs to have a concept of time. However, deserts have strata that indicate the passage of time, so I adapted that into a visual shorthand for deadlines in the future. I also thought about how zen gardens typically have decoration and used that to develop a mechanism for rewarding the user for completing milestones by giving them literal stones to place in their virtual zen garden. Together these incentives would make task management less a source of stress and more a calming break from work.