← BackAI Community Design · 2025

MindShapes

A visual vocabulary for what you can't say. Draw shapes. Share them. Resonate.

Designer · AI-assisted build · 2025

What it is

A community app where people draw abstract shapes to express psychological symptoms, building a collective visual dictionary that transcends language barriers. Particularly focused on refugees with PTSD and trauma survivors who face language barriers in traditional therapy.

“Some ideas need a decade to ripen. In 2016, I designed a nonlingual trauma therapy manual at Folkwang, physical tools for therapists working with refugees who couldn't access talk therapy. The idea never left me. Now, with AI as a building partner, I can finally revisit and ship product ideas that I had years ago, in days instead of semesters.”

Problem

1 billion people affected by trauma.
Most can't access therapy in their language.

Refugees wait 6-8 months for therapy. When they get it, language barriers make psychoeducation nearly impossible. Trauma is stored non-verbally. Visual expression can bypass what words cannot reach.

The psychology

Non-verbal trauma processing

Traumatic memory is encoded differently from ordinary autobiographical memory, held in sensory and bodily form rather than as a narrative that can be told in order. This is why talking therapies can stall: the material is not stored as language, and asking someone to narrate it asks them to translate first. For a refugee working through an interpreter, that translation happens twice, and the second one loses more than the first.

What it changed

It moved expression before language rather than after it. People draw an abstract shape for a symptom instead of naming it, so the first act asks nothing of vocabulary. Because the shapes are shared, the library also becomes a vocabulary built by the people using it, where recognising someone else's shape does the work an interpreter otherwise would.

A collective visual dictionary of the mind

Browse shapes others have drawn to express dissociation, hypervigilance, flashbacks, numbness. Each shape carries a silent 'resonance', not a like, but a 'me too.'

Draw what words can't reach

Brush, blob, spray, pencil, tools for abstract expression. Guided prompts help you start: 'What does your anxiety feel like right now?' Then tag it with a symptom category and body location.

Resonate, adapt, learn

Each shape is a window into someone's experience. See how 247 others resonated. Fork a shape and make it yours. The vocabulary grows with every contribution.

Product

Three core experiences

Shape Library

Shape Creator

Publish Flow

Key Insight

“Resonance” instead of “Likes”

A silent “me too”: not approval, but recognition. When someone resonates with your shape, it means “I feel this too.” The interaction is a hand-wave, not a heart. Community validation without performance pressure.

For Therapists, clinical tool framing

Stack & Tools

Claude (Opus)Claude Code

design

Figma

code

Next.jsTypeScriptTailwind CSSFramer Motion

infra

Vercel

Inner Light

Open question

Can shapes made collectively give form to experiences people cannot describe or picture?

What the data shows

Which patterns are browsed, how long shapes are considered, and which get resonated with rather than scrolled past.

What it does not

Recognition is not relief. Finding a shape does not show it helped.

More client and product design case studies at hannadevries.com