Haven, an ambient AI layer for multi-context work
Haven · Ambient AI · Concept product

An ambient layer for people who work in many contexts at once.

Haven is a concept for an OS-layer assistant that sits above the tools you already use, understands which context you are in, and helps you move between them without losing your thread. It does not replace your tools. It reads across them, holds the ones you are not in, and surfaces what matters.

Role

Product Designer

Timeline

5 Months

Team

Solo, self-directed

Scope

Research to UI

Overview

what haven is

The project started from a personal frustration, and became a design argument. The people I designed for do not have a productivity problem. They have a context problem. No tool understands which world they are in, what has changed in the others, or how to help them cross over. Haven is built to answer exactly those three questions.

  1. Reads across tools Connects, does not replace

    It links to Gmail, Figma, WhatsApp, Calendar, Notion, and more, and reads across them. It never tries to be your inbox or your canvas.

  2. Organised by world Context is the primitive

    Each client, project, or life domain is a named World with its own tools, history, and privacy boundary. Switching worlds swaps the whole context.

  3. Three registers Whisper, talk, record

    The same information appears at three levels of attention: a full dashboard, a summoned pill for mid-flow questions, and a quiet tray for glances.

The problem

Every tool assumes it's your only context, so the cost of juggling many falls on you.

How might we help people move between contexts without losing their thread?

01The problem

a day spent managing the gaps between tools

Every tool is designed as if it is the only context that matters. One inbox, one task list, one project. Nobody designs for the person juggling three. The cost lands on that person, in four predictable places across the day.

  1. 01 The morning scan

    Before any real work starts, people open four to eight apps to work out what needs attention. The order is set by whoever messaged last, not by what matters.

  2. 02 Fragile focus

    Deep work is a rare luxury, not a default. A single ping from another context is enough to break it, and most of those pings are self-generated.

  3. 03 Switching with no memory

    Moving from one client to another means rebuilding an entire mental world by hand. There is no tool that saves or restores where things were left.

  4. 04 A day that never ends

    Without a real shutdown, the brain never disengages. There is always one more message, so work bleeds permanently into the evening.

02Research

what the research validated

Six semi-structured interviews across freelance, student, intern, and corporate profiles, plus a study of the tool landscape and the literature on cognitive load and context switching. Three participants also kept time-stamped notes over three days.

An emotional journey curve across a workday: anxious at morning triage, calm entering work, dropping at mid-work interruption, low through context switching, and low again at end of day.
The workday mapped as an emotional arc. It dips at the morning scan, peaks once focus begins, and falls again at every interruption, switch, and the unclosed end of day.
Morning triage 20–40 min lost to scanning apps before any real work begins. Interviews & field notes
After a switch 12–18 min of mental reconstruction to re-enter a different client context. Field observation
On AI acting 83% distrusted an AI that takes action without showing its reasoning first. Interviews
“People valued feeling less overwhelmed more than getting more done.”

This finding reset the whole direction. The pain was not the volume of work. It was managing the transitions between contexts. So Haven optimises for cognitive clarity, not throughput. Success is whether the person feels oriented and in control.

Who it is for
Persona one, Neha, aged 23 to 27, a full-time front-end and back-end developer at SAP Labs. She values deep focus time, cross-team clarity, and a genuine end-of-day closure. Her challenges are enterprise lockdowns blocking third-party tools, two hours lost to alignment calls before coding, and no clean shutdown ritual.
Persona two, Aryan K, aged 18 to 22, a UI/UX design student and freelancer. He values autonomy, creative output, client trust, and cognitive clarity. His challenge is context collapse when switching between college, client A, and client B, with WhatsApp used for professional feedback with no structure.

Two personas held the design honest. A developer inside an enterprise, and a student juggling college and two freelance clients.

03The gap

where the existing tools stop

Eighteen products were reviewed across three categories. Each solves part of the problem and leaves the rest untouched. No product sits where all three overlap.

  1. 01 Ambient surfaces

    Launchers like Raycast and Alfred are fast and always available, but stateless. They can open a file, not tell you which file to open first.

  2. 02 AI orchestrators

    Tools like Copilot and Dimension work across apps, but assume a single context, and often ask for a level of trust the user does not have.

  3. 03 Workspace managers

    Arc, Wavebox, and Rambox separate contexts into workspaces, but have no intelligence. They cannot tell you what is urgent or what changed.

The whitespace

No product combines ambient presence, context intelligence, and graduated AI trust in one place. That intersection, the missing connective layer above every tool, is the space Haven was designed to occupy.

04Opportunities

from findings to a brief

The journey map and the affinity clusters pointed to four opportunity areas, each tied to a specific moment in the day. Each one then became a How Might We question that framed the design work.

  1. 01 Replace the morning scan

    Consolidate signal from across the tools into one ambient surface, ordered by importance. It aims to remove the 20 to 40 minutes of morning triage.

  2. 02 Protect deep work

    Defer non-urgent pings and resurface them at a chosen moment, protecting flow without making the person go dark to everyone else.

  3. 03 Eliminate context reconstruction

    Save and restore the full working state for each client or project, open files, active threads, pending decisions, in a single action.

  4. 04 Design the end of day

    Create a deliberate shutdown that shows evidence of work done, holds late signals, and grants permission to disengage.

How might we

  1. Morning triage

    How might we replace the multi-app morning scan with a single ambient surface that shows what actually matters, ordered by importance, not recency?

  2. Deep work

    How might we protect a person's focus state without making them go dark to the rest of the world?

  3. Context switch

    How might we make switching between client contexts feel like opening a drawer rather than rebuilding a mental world from scratch?

  4. AI trust

    How might we make an AI agent's actions fully legible and reversible, so a user never feels they have lost control of their own files?

  5. End of day

    How might we design a genuine end-of-day ritual that gives a person cognitive closure, not just a closed laptop?

05Principles

five principles that decided everything

Each principle came straight from a research finding, and each one worked as a filter. For any design choice, the question was whether it moved toward these or away from them.

  1. 01 Priority over recency

    No surface ever orders by time received. Signal is ranked by deadline, sender, impact, and frequency, and the reason is always available.

  2. 02 Trust through transparency

    The agent never acts silently. Every surfaced item and every suggestion can show what Haven read and why it drew the conclusion it did.

  3. 03 Ambient, not intrusive

    Available when needed, invisible when not. It never steals focus, never pops up uninvited, and holds notifications instead of forwarding them.

  4. 04 Context as the primitive

    Everything is organised by World. Navigation, history, permissions, and tool connections all live at the level of the client or project.

  5. 05 Emotional outcome first

    Haven is measured by how the person feels, not how much they finish. Every micro-decision aims at orientation and calm.

06Architecture

information architecture

One root, three surfaces. Haven branches into the Tray Panel for glances, the AI Pill for mid-flow input, and the dashboard for the full picture, with Worlds, Connectors, and the graduated permissions running underneath.

Haven's information architecture. Haven branches into three surfaces. The Tray Panel holds At Glance, Stack, Pomodoro, Calendar, and Notes. The AI Pill holds Idle, Prompt Input, and Response states. The dashboard holds the Hub with morning briefing and content tabs for Meetings, Todo, and Catch Up, plus Connectors, Activities, Worlds, Skills, Chat, and Account.

Scroll sideways to follow the full map.

The full map. The three surfaces share one intelligence, and the dashboard carries the deeper flows, from the morning briefing and its content tabs down to connectors and per-world permissions.
07Morning briefing

the day, before you open six apps

The Hub opens on a briefing, not a dashboard. It reads across the connected tools overnight and lays out the day in one place, ordered by importance. It aims to replace the morning scan and the twenty to forty minutes it costs.

Haven's Hub. A left sidebar with Hub, Chat, Skills, Activities, Connectors, and Worlds. The main panel greets the person by name and lays out the day's meetings, free time, and priority pings, with a briefing of what changed overnight.
The Hub greets the person, states the shape of the day, and briefs what changed overnight. Each line can act, and each carries the reason it was surfaced.
Before
  1. Open WhatsApp
  2. →
  3. Gmail
  4. →
  5. Calendar
  6. →
  7. Figma
  8. →
  9. build the plan by hand
With Haven
  1. Open the briefing
  2. →
  3. read what matters, in order
  4. →
  5. act or defer
08The dashboard

catch up, meetings, and follow-through

Behind the briefing, the same window holds three working views. Each one is built so the person stays in one place while the work moves to where it needs to go.

Catch Up

Catch Up view. A conversation is summarised, the original message is quoted, and Haven has drafted a reply with options to make it shorter, more formal, or warmer, and buttons to edit or send.
Everything that happened while you were away, summarised and prioritised. Haven drafts a reply you can send or edit in one tap, and shows the source it drew from.

Meetings

Meetings view. Each meeting shows the time, who is attending, and an AI summary of what it is about and what is expected, with options to open details or join.
Your day's meetings with the context you would normally scramble to find, so you walk in prepared rather than catching up in the first five minutes.

To Do

To Do view. A list of tasks, some checked, with an Assign action on each, and below it a set of tasks suggested by Haven pulled from conversations, each with an assign option.
Your own tasks sit alongside the ones Haven pulls from conversations. Assign a task to Haven and it handles the follow-through, so you stay in one place while the work moves.
09The ambient layer

the same intelligence, at three levels of attention

The dashboard is for deep setup. Most of the day, the person is inside another tool. So the same intelligence appears in lighter registers: a pill summoned mid-flow, a quiet strip for glances, and a voice input that does not break the current working state.

  1. Record The dashboard

    For morning orientation and deep setup. The full picture, when the person can give it their attention.

  2. Conversation The pill

    Summoned mid-flow to ask a question or take an action, then dismissed. It never appears uninvited.

  3. Whisper The tray

    A persistent, non-intrusive strip that shows the active World. It informs without demanding a click.

At a glance

The ambient At Glance panel over the desktop. A catch up list, upcoming events, and a to-do column, an event card where Haven has drafted a reply, plus a stash of captured items, a calendar filtered to the Work world, a Pomodoro focus timer, and a notes pane.
Catch up, the day's events, and the to-do list in one strip, with a drafted reply ready to send, a calendar filtered to the active World, a focus timer, and a scratch stash. All of it summoned without leaving the current app.

The pill, working

The Haven pill in use. A morning greeting, a Type or hold Alt plus H to speak input, the pill listening, a spoken command to open a document and make a presentation, Haven finding the document, a clarifying question about the primary audience, and a finished presentation ready to open.
A spoken request becomes a multi-step task. Haven finds the file, asks the one thing it needs to know, works, and hands back a finished result, without ever opening the dashboard.

Focus and stash

Two ambient tools. An AI focus session with a Pomodoro timer and quiet tray whispers nudging progress on a task, and Stash, a universal capture bar that holds copied text, links, colours, and files ready to drop into the right World.
A focus session that whispers gentle nudges from the tray instead of interrupting, and Stash, a universal capture bar that holds anything you copy until you drop it into the right World.

Hand it to Haven

Assigning a task to Haven from the to-do list. Haven breaks Ship onboarding v3 into sub-steps, export frames, generate captions, post, and summarise, asks for approval, works through them with progress shown, and reports the task done.
Assign a task and the agent breaks it into steps, shows the plan, and asks before it acts. It works through each one in the open and reports back, so control always stays with the person.

How the pill works

  1. Summon with Win+H
  2. →
  3. type or speak
  4. →
  5. read, suggest, or act
  6. →
  7. dismiss, back to work
10The shutdown

a real end to the day

Every participant described work bleeding into the night, and none had a reliable way to stop. The shutdown is a deliberate close. It shows evidence of what got done, holds late signals until morning, and gives permission to disengage.

The shutdown screen. It says good night by name, summarises what was shipped, closed, and how long was held in focus, lists what was finished today, what is being left behind tonight, tomorrow's first moves, and one thing to take away, with a button to close everything and sign off.
A summary of the day, the low-priority items held until morning, and tomorrow's first moves. Late pings are caught by the ambient layer rather than delivered at 11pm.
11Prototype

try it

The interactive prototype runs the core flows, from the morning briefing through catching up, switching worlds, and the shutdown. Click through it below.

Interactive prototype
12Brand & moodboard

a calm, spatial, sky-blue world

Before the screens came the feeling. The visual direction reaches for calm technology: soft blues, open sky, and space to breathe. The mark is a lowercase h that doubles as a mountain, and the language stays quiet, warm, and grounded.

A moodboard of blue gradients, open skies, calm interface references, and a figure walking toward light, setting the visual direction for Haven.
The moodboard. Ambient gradients, sky and cloud imagery, and calm, spacious interfaces set the register before a single screen was drawn.
Haven brand identity. The logo lockup on a construction grid, and three brand cards: the wordmark over a mountain, the line the thinking layer above your tools on open sky, and one calm view of everything across your work on a gradient.
The identity. The mark sits on a construction grid, and the lockups carry the same line across a mountain, an open sky, and a gradient.
13Design system

the system underneath

Haven runs on a token-based system. One typeface at intentional weights, five colour ramps built on a primary blue, and scales for spacing, radius, and control heights so every surface stays consistent.

Type

Everything is set in DM Sans. Headings use SemiBold with tight tracking, down to minus 2.2 percent. Body text runs from 10 to 18px with letter spacing tuned for legibility at each size.

SemiBold headings & labels Medium interactive & emphasis Regular body & descriptions

Colour

Five ramps, each running 50 to 1000. Blue is the primary brand ramp. Red, orange, and green carry status, and a cool zinc holds the neutral surfaces.

Blue primary brand ramp · named Aliceblue, Blue Bayoux, Spindle, Lightsteelblue, Danube
50 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Red error
50 200 400 500 600 800 1000
Orange warning
50 200 400 500 600 800 1000
Green success
50 200 400 500 600 800 1000
Zinc neutral surfaces
50 200 400 500 700 900 1000

Scales

Spacing 4 → 40px, 10 steps Radius 8 → 400px, pill at the top Control 32 / 48 / 56px heights
14Reflection

what worked, and what is unresolved

“The next generation of software will be judged less by what it can do, and more by how gracefully it stays out of your way.”

What worked

Starting with research, before any design, meant every core idea traces back to something a person said. The Worlds metaphor landed without explanation. And the trust ladder gave the person and the agent a genuinely different relationship, one the competitive set does not offer.

What is unresolved

The shutdown is the least validated surface. Onboarding, how a person creates their first World and connects their first tool, was scoped out and is really the critical first experience. Both would come first in a second round, tested with the prototype.

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