Place in Capture

Place meaningful pings in capture to support you in keeping them top-of-mind.

"Warm your words" placed in caption. See demo.

Thrust

How might the app support Practitioners in keeping meaningful Pings top of mind?

Outcome(s)

How – if at all – should the number of Pings that Practitioners can place in Capture be constrained?

This question eluded obvious resolution throughout this exploration.

To start, we decided to constrain the feature such that only one ping can be "placed in capture" at a time.

This direction emerged in conversation with Rache and through reflecting with Irena & Jasmine, during the 8 July 2025 design session.

This direction is grounded in two ideas:

1. Simplicity: it's important the feature be simple so people can grasp it intuitively. If we led with an open-ended or multi-ping set, we'd need to design and communicate a larger number of mechanics: How many pings you can place? How they are cycled through? Etc. By starting simple, I think people will be more likely to make a clear choice about how/if they use the feature. And from this actual use (or lack thereof), we'll discover how/if the functionality might need to evolve.

2. Grounding: During the call with Jasmine and Irena, we converged on the following question:

I wonder how/if constraint comes into the picture…physicality, by definition, creates containment…and so the question then becomes, where/how does ping practice create containment?

This question continues to resonate with me. We've (Rachel and I) also sensed — both in ourselves and other Practitioners — an attraction towards tangibility, stability, and containment (as seen in the interest in exporting and printing). I think placing a single ping in capture supports this instinct and will help us to understand it with more nuance.

Open questions

• What icon pairs well with the action of "placing" a Ping in capture?

• How might we communicate the fact that a Ping you're viewing is currently "placed in capture" in a way that supports/reinforces the meaning of the action?

• How – if at all – might you be able to navigate from capture directly to a ping you see within it?

• How can you remove a ping from capture? Maybe to start you’ll have to search for it and then remove it via long-press?

Loose

• 8 July 2025

  • Regardless of initial implementation, I think we need to log what pings you place in capture in when so that we can create the potential for our future selves to explore ideas like:

    • Enabling people to see the pings they placed in capture over time; i assume this is going to be a meaningful set

    • Enabling people to replace a ping that's not currently resonating with one from the past that might be...

  • I think also retaining this history/log will make the act of setting a new ping in capture feel even more lightweight (as it ought to be)

• 1 July 2025

  • How – if at all – might you be able to navigate from capture directly to a ping you see within it?