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🎭 Submitting Digital Kathputli — here's the story behind it.
When the Config Makeathon was announced, I kept thinking about what I wanted to build. I asked myself one question: "What feeling am I uniquely equipped to digitize?"
The answer came from a childhood memory.
Growing up, I was fascinated by Rajasthani Kathputli — traditional string puppetry that's been alive for over 1000 years. Not just by the puppets, but by the puppeteers. How they gave life to something lifeless using only their fingers.
I wanted to bring that feeling into the browser.
So I built Digital Kathputli — an interactive string puppetry experience where your hand becomes the controller, your fingers become the strings, and anyone can become a puppeteer.
🎪 The experience takes you through:
🎭 A playful onboarding
🪆 Choosing your puppet
🖐️ Performing using live hand tracking
👆 Move your index finger to animate one arm.
🤌 Curl your ring finger to move the other.
✋ Raise your hand to lift the puppet onto the stage.
📸 Strike your favourite pose and download a vintage Rajasthani postcard as a digital souvenir.
🛠️ Built with:
Figma Make — the complete interactive experience
MediaPipe Hand Landmarker — real-time hand tracking
Figma Weave — bandhani-inspired stage, theatre seal, and puppet illustrations
Suno AI — custom Rajasthani folk opening music
GitHub — asset hosting
💡 What I learned
Building this project meant constantly experimenting, breaking things, and iterating.
The biggest challenges were testing every camera interaction on the published site because the Make preview can't access webcams, working around browser audio restrictions, and simplifying an illustrated puppet rig into something that animated smoothly.
The biggest takeaway?
Better context beats more prompts.
🎭 Try the interactive experience: Digital Kathputli.figma.site
🔗Read : X Post
💻 Best experienced on a desktop/laptop with a webcam.
Raj and Rani are ready.
The stage is set. 🎪
wow I love this!
That means a lot.. Thanks!
nostalgia 😄
I'm so glad it brought back those memories! 🎭
The network for creativity
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Did you know your home reflects how much you read?
Not a metaphor. A literal one.
Add a book. Set a timer. Watch your apartment slowly come alive as you read. Dust clears in real time. Rooms bloom from neglect to warmth. Stop reading and watch it all fade back.
The Problem
Most reading trackers are lists. Cold. Forgettable. They record what you have not done without making you feel anything about it. You open the app, see a number, close the app. Nothing changes inside you.
Shelf Life is built around a different belief. Your habits should live somewhere. They should breathe. They should have consequences you can see.
Your bedroom holds the book you read before sleep. Your kitchen holds the article you meant to finish over coffee. Your study holds the essay you keep putting off. Read consistently and each space blooms back to life through an organic dust clearing animation driven by your actual reading time. Neglect your reading and the dust returns. Your home becomes a mirror of your habits. Honest and quiet and impossible to ignore.
I deliberately chose not to let users upload or read books inside the app. The moment you can read inside a tracker it stops being a tracker and starts competing with the experience of actually holding a book. Shelf Life honours the ritual of reading without replacing it.
How It Was Built
I started with a design philosophy before I started with a prompt. Warmth. Craft. Human first. Every decision was made to make the user feel something not just complete a task.
The isometric apartment and all ten room images including the neglected and bloomed states for each of the five rooms were generated entirely using Figma Weave. I used Figma for rapid design ideation and layout exploration before moving into Figma Make.
In Figma Make I built the full app in React and TypeScript. The core technical challenge was the dust clearing animation. It uses an SVG mask system with organic circular spots growing via requestAnimationFrame running in parallel with the reading timer. Each spot has its own delay and duration so the reveal feels natural and alive rather than mechanical. The same spots reverse in mirror order when the room returns to neglected. The animation runs both ways. Forward when you read. Backward when you stop.
Room specific ambient music plays in each space. The bedroom has soft rain and piano. The kitchen has morning acoustic warmth. The living room has fireplace crackle. The study is near silence. Each room sounds like it feels.
Tools Used
Figma Weave for AI image generation across all ten room backgrounds
Figma for design ideation and layout
Figma Make for the full app built in React and TypeScript
The Moment That Matters
Start a reading timer. Watch your room slowly clean itself in real time. Organic dust spots grow across the image revealing the bloomed version beneath. It is not a progress bar. It is not a percentage. It is your home breathing back to life because you chose to read.
When the timer ends the room holds its bloomed state then gradually returns to neglect. The direction of the animation tells you everything about your relationship with reading that week.
Most people go quiet when they watch it happen for the first time.
Excellent presentation 👏
I built an anonymous corner for the internet. It's called the Fruit Market. 🍊🍓
Every visitor leaves behind a unique fruit that represents them.
You choose a fruit, give it a label, add a few pieces of identity, and answer a prompt about something you're carrying, longing for, or wishing someone understood.
Then you place it on the shelf.
The result is a market full of anonymous human artifacts:
A mango who is missing home.
A peach who is terrified of graduating.
A dragon fruit who is searching for purpose.
The idea came from a question:
How deeply can we understand each other when names are removed?
Built with Figma and Figma Make on my humble phone and tablet. My goal was to create a whimsical, imperfect, yet vulnerable space that feels somewhere between a community bulletin board, a missed-connections page, and a message in a bottle.
Please, if you’re willing, leave a piece of yourself at the Fruit Market. <3
Website: thefruitmarket.figma.site
LinkedIn Post (feel free to connect!): https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7471214902842470401/
Figma Community Link (a copy of the website w/o the backend): https://www.figma.com/community/file/1647270469719499321
Made for the Contra x Figma Makeathon.
Wonderful and worth th build
Traditional museums preserve what changed the world.
What about the objects that changed you?
The train ticket you never threw away.
The toy you carried everywhere.
The watch your grandfather wore every day.
The sketch that started your career.
The random object sitting in a drawer that somehow means everything.
I'm building People's Museum, a digital museum where anyone can preserve one meaningful object and the story behind it.
No likes. No followers. No algorithms.
Just people, objects, and the reasons they matter.
If you could preserve one object forever, what would it be?
The concept is strong, but the execution makes it even better. Great work!
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