Case Study

Drifter: A Mindful Walking App

Project Overview

Drifter is a mindful walking app developed as part of an MSc thesis (July 2023–January 2024), designed to train individuals to become more aware of their walking experiences as a means of supporting wellbeing. The project was led by Karl Tonna using a participatory, experience-centred design methodology.

Conceptual Foundation

Most popular mindfulness apps focus on sedentary meditation, which can produce feelings of restlessness in beginners, contributing to notoriously low retention rates. Drifter responds to this by reframing mindfulness as something that can be practised informally by curious to the sights, scents and sounds of the everyday city rather than through structured stillness.

The vehicle for this is walking; specifically, the drift. The concept is borrowed from the Situationist International, a mid-twentieth century movement of artists and theorists who argued that the urban environment could be experienced as a site of psychic and sensory encounter rather than merely functional transit. For the Situationists, the dérive, an aimless, unplanned wandering through the city guided by atmosphere and impulse rather than destination, was a means of breaking habitual perception and reawakening sensitivity to one's surroundings. It was a deliberate act of resistance against the goal-oriented, efficiency-driven logic that governs most urban movement.

Drifter takes this idea and translates it into a contemporary wellness context. The central premise is that aimlessness itself is the mechanism: by removing the destination, the walker is freed from the cognitive tunnel of arrival, and attention is redirected outward, toward texture, sound, smell, and the incidental strangeness of the city. Where sedentary meditation asks the practitioner to find stillness and turn inward, the drift asks them to move and turn outward as a means of presence.

Phase 1: User Research - Walking Interviews

To test this premise empirically, participants were taken on two types of walks in sequence. The first was a typical goal-oriented walk , a familiar route the participant already used, such as the journey from home to a supermarket, serving as a baseline for observational awareness. The second was an aimless drift, beginning where the first walk ended, with a dice used to introduce directional randomness and simulate genuine aimlessness.

The results were striking. During a 15-minute goal-oriented walk, participants made an average of 3 observations of their environment. During a 15-minute drift, this rose to 18 observations, a sixfold increase. The pattern was consistent enough across participants to validate the drift as a basis for teaching mindful walking to beginners.

The research identified clear reasons for this disparity. Goal-oriented walks, particularly along familiar routes, breed a kind of perceptual numbness: repetition induces boredom, boredom causes the mind to wander, and the focus on reaching a destination efficiently closes off peripheral attention. The walker moves through the city without really seeing it. The drift, by contrast, introduces novelty at every turn, unfamiliar streets, unexpected encounters, which triggers curiosity and draws the walker into the present moment. The absence of a destination removes the forward-pull of arrival, making it easier to simply be where one is.

However, the research also surfaced several factors that could inhibit presence even during a drift. Phone notifications and the ambient anxiety of FOMO were recurring disruptions. Spatial anxiety, the fear of becoming lost and not knowing how to return, emerged as a significant barrier, particularly for participants less confident in urban navigation. And subjective interest played a role: participants were more attentive when the environment around them aligned with their personal interests, and more prone to disengagement in areas they perceived as low-stimulation, such as uniform residential streets.

These findings shaped everything that followed, both the features the app would need to offer and the tensions it would need to navigate between preserving aimlessness and providing enough structure to make drifting feel safe and accessible.

Phase 2: Co-Design

Co-design workshops generated three core feature ideas: (A) a customisable drift generator using filters to produce routes, presenting only a broad overview of the area to preserve aimlessness while easing spatial anxiety; (B) a library of pre-set, thematic drifts; and (C) audio-based mindfulness prompts to direct attention to environmental sights, sounds, and scents. Participants unanimously agreed that the app should centre a personalised, private experience.

The audio guidance, delivered via headphones to minimise screen use, came to include: navigational directions to an unknown destination; sensory prompts directing attention to the immediate environment; and additional support for mind-wandering-prone users.

Key screens include:

• Onboarding: Introduces the novel concept to new users.

  
  

• Home: Surfaces location-based drift suggestions, lowering the friction between intention and action.

  
  

• Explore: A community and expert library of themed drifts (e.g. a drift through Spitalfields Market with context-specific prompts).

  
  

• Set Up a Drift: A four-step customisation flow allowing users to define duration, location, and what they wish to notice.

  
  

• History: A retrospective view of past drifts, with wellbeing summaries and patterns in what the user tends to notice.

Phase 3: User Testing

Two rounds of testing were conducted. The first assessed interface usability. The second evaluated the lived experience of the audio prompts, with participants walking independently along Camden Passage, Islington. Qualitative feedback revealed tensions between navigating an unfamiliar environment and simultaneously processing audio instructions. One participant noted the cognitive load of listening while walking somewhere new; another described a pleasurable quality of directed noticing; a third honestly acknowledged the impossibility of fully controlling one's thoughts.

Future Directions

The project closes by identifying two avenues for further research: accessibility, exploring how users who require wheelchairs might similarly benefit from mindful drifting, and deeper integration of phone sensors and functionality to support the mindful experience.