Heirloom

The people who raise us shape our values and sense of self, but modern life has scattered families across cities, demanding careers, and generational divides. A group chat that wakes up only for birthday emojis offers the illusion of closeness, while irreplaceable oral histories quietly disappear.

Most people know little about their lineage past their grandparents, and elders’ life lessons often vanish before anyone writes them down. The tools that exist don’t help: family-tree sites feel like filling out forms, and shared albums become impersonal photo dumps.

We wanted to build the opposite: a space where family culture actually lives and grows.

The initial branding of the app was important to me. My team floated a more traditional, nature-inspired theme for a family-tree project, but I wanted an identity that was more unique and memorable. Before touching the UI, I spent time looking through color palettes, brainstorming names, and drafting a logo. We landed on a warm pink, purple, and tan palette to make the app feel comforting and homey, and a logo whose linked O’s represent intertwining family relations.

We carried that idea into our AI agent, Loomie, a ball of yarn that keeps in line with the multiple meanings nested within “Heirloom”: it’s meant to knit people together. Instead of questionnaires or cold text prompts, Loomie speaks aloud and listens like an attentive grandchild, latching onto sensory details, like the song on an old road trip or the smell of a childhood kitchen, to gently guide elders through their memories.

I designed Loomie’s presence around the home screen. The yarn ball sits raised at the center of the navigation bar, and tapping it softly blurs the photo board so the conversation appears on top as chat bubbles, keeping the family visible behind every story. A small status pill shows whether Loomie is listening, thinking, or speaking.

For the main interface, I chose a photo board over a traditional family tree. The strings connecting each photo echo the Heirloom theme, and family photos feel far more personal than a web of names. Pushpins recur throughout the app as a thematic object, standing out against the tan background. Finally, for the family records section, I designed an actual bookshelf, so keeping track of your history feels familiar and analog.

Heirloom ended as one working iOS app that feels the way we hoped: a warm place where a grandfather’s story becomes a pinned polaroid, a thread to his grandson, and a reason to call. My Figma designs, the team’s voice and AI work, and a shared family archive run together on real phones. Out of 200+ teams, it placed 3rd in Meta’s challenge: Bringing People Closer Together with AI.

What I contributed:

• The product’s visual language and every screen’s design, from the corkboard and twine to the sepia globe and bookshelf
• The SwiftUI implementation of those designs as reusable, animated components
• The experience design of Sparks
• The integration, backend, and performance work that got it running for the demo