Calvin Iwata Memoji, smilingCalvin Iwata Memoji, celebrating with confetti
ProductGraduate coursework

Zeniversity

A meditation app for students who were not looking after their own mental health, me included.

Four Zeniversity phone screens side by side, showing meditation tracks, a group room of participant avatars, a list of therapists, and a camera view detecting a smile

The problem

I was working full-time and studying full-time, and it cost me. I went looking for how other students coped because I wasn’t coping well myself.

So the question was narrow: how do students actually cope with stress, and what would help? I ran interviews and diary studies, then built an affinity diagram.

The finding that shaped everything: students weren’t neglecting their mental health for lack of tools. They were already carrying enough, and anything that asked for more attention was going to lose.

An affinity diagram of color-coded notes from student interviews and diary studies, clustered into common themes about coping with school stress
The affinity diagram. Clustering the interviews first is what stopped the feature list from being a guess.

What I did

Two decisions came out of that.

Four coping paths, not one. People cope differently, and the interviews said so plainly. Some wanted to be alone with it, some wanted company, some wanted a professional, some just wanted relief.

A single meditation feed would have served the first group and lost the rest.

The interface had to be quiet. So it leans on white space, plain illustration and a card system. I built a component library so consistency was structural, not something I kept having to remember.

The four paths

Open the Figma prototype
  1. The Zeniversity meditation screen with track cards for anxiety, relationships, productivity and motivation, and a docked mini player part way through a three minute track

    1. Alone, if that is easier. Self-guided tracks by what is actually wrong, anxiety or relationships or productivity, not by length. The player docks so browsing does not stop the audio.

  2. A Zeniversity group room called Anything, showing a grid of participant avatars with muted microphone badges, several labelled Anonymous, and a field to share your thoughts

    2. Or with other people. A room per topic, microphone optional, and Anonymous as a first-class choice. Wanting company without wanting to be identified came straight out of the interviews.

  3. The Zeniversity professionals screen listing therapists with ratings, hourly price, years of experience, location and specialism tags, above a searchable full list

    3. Or with a professional. Filterable by what you need help with, with price and location visible up front, because the cost of asking is the thing that stops people asking.

  4. A Zeniversity camera screen with a face detection frame over a smiling person and the message Smile Recognized

    4. Or the dark-horse idea. Smile detection, and I called it a dark horse at the time for good reason. The premise, that a held smile lifts your mood, is contested rather than settled, so treat this as the speculative one of the four.

The Zeniversity Figma canvas showing the logo, color and type styles, and component sets for cards, tab bars, chat bubbles and professional listings
The component library. Placeholder copy inside a component spec is correct; a spec is not the place for real sentences.

Outcome

A student in testing put it better than my writeup did. They’d been coping with school stress by snacking, and the app gave them something to do with other people instead.

That’s one participant, not a result. The project ended where coursework ends.

What carried forward was the framing. Two years later my MYND capstone came at the same problem from the opposite end. Zeniversity offered paths and waited to be opened. MYND watched for the moment you needed one.

The rest of the graduate work is in UC Berkeley.

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