The Bay Area's Writing Salon offers a program called Round Robin, a generative writing seminar offered in 3-, 6-, and 8-week versions. In 2021, I participated in the Spring 6-week Round Robin program. It was indeed a powerful way to motivate me to write for at least 12-minutes a day, and I've done several more Round Robins.
For some background: Jane Underwood, the founder of the Round Robin, created and formalized the RR process. In her system, each writer in the program is assigned a new partner every week, with whom they are obligated to share a piece of writing each day via email. The writing should be done in 10-12 minutes, though it can be edited until the writer is ready to send it. The writer's partner will also send their 10-12 minute writer. The writer then has until the end of the next day to provide their partner with positive feedback.
This continues every day until the next week, when new partners are assigned. With positive feedback received every day, the writers are incentivized to continue to write with the praise their receive and often, with the relationships they forge with fellow writers.
I have described the RR process to friends and co-workers who come from dozens of different backgrounds: academics, artists, engineers. They have all expressed interest in a program that does what RR does for writers, but for their field.
It occurred to me that it would be relatively simply to prototype and code a bare-boned application that arranges partners and prompt on a weekly basis. I began by sketching out what the mobile application version of this would look like.
A very messy sketch of the initial protoype
With the basic functions of the app sketched out, I threw the design into Adobe XD to test out a few flows.
