TIMELINE
2 weeks
SERVICES
Prototyping
AI-native product design
Copywriting
Branding
ROLE
Product designer
Brand designer
TOOLS
Claude
Paper
Flora AI
The problem with real-time only
Photo booths are synchronous by design - everyone joins in and presses the button at the same second. Pocket Booth copied that constraint onto mobile, so if your best friend lived in Seoul, you simply couldn't booth together.
The fix wasn't a bolted-on "remote mode." It was rethinking the model: let the strip live in an open, developing state — half-shot, waiting for the other person — instead oF completing in one sitting.
"The strip doesn't finish when you shoot. It finishes when you both do."
That shift created a problem I wanted to solve: how do you show a strip that's only half-real, communicate waiting, and make the moment feel completed together despite the distance?
Mapping the emotional arc
One async session isn't a single moment, it's a continuous curve. Plotting how it feels at every stage exposes the design target: the dip while you wait for the other person to shoot their half. Everything downstream was built to hold that dip.