Bivouac — UX & Product Design for Outdoor Safety
A long-term product exploration combining field research, user interviews, and high-fidelity prototyping — from master's thesis to vibe coding experiment.
Project context
- Role
- Solo — UX research, product strategy, UI design, prototyping
- Timeline
-
- 2018 — Master's thesis: field research, interviews, initial design exploration
- 2023 — Reboot: product direction, information architecture, Figma prototype
- 2025–2026 — Vibe coding phase: Figma Make, Claude, pre-industrialization, R&D at Camptocamp
- Tools
- Figma · Figma Make · Claude · User interviews · Field observation
- Research partners
- PGHM Chamonix (mountain rescue) · ARVA (avalanche safety equipment)
- Project type
- Personal project / R&D exploration at Camptocamp
The problem
Most outdoor apps optimize for discovery and engagement — surfacing "best spots," rankings, user-generated tips. In a mountain bivouac context, that logic backfires: it accelerates overuse, damages fragile ecosystems, and breeds a consumer mindset that conflicts with how mountain communities think about safety and responsibility.
The challenge wasn't to build a smarter recommendation engine. It was to design a decision-support tool — one that makes fragmented, localized regulations accessible and actionable, without encouraging harmful behavior in the process.
Research & field work
Research combined direct field observation with semi-structured interviews. Conversations with actors from PGHM Chamonix (mountain rescue) and ARVA (avalanche safety equipment) shaped a clearer picture of how information circulates — and sometimes fails to — in high-stakes outdoor contexts.
Early work also surfaced a consistent pattern: regulations exist, but they are buried across dozens of jurisdictions with no consistent format, no unified access point, and no adaptation for mobile or field use.
"Regulations exist — but users can't find them in time. The problem isn't access to rules, it's that rules are scattered across dozens of jurisdictions with no consistent format."
Synthesized from field interviews, 2018
Design decisions
Every significant design decision was a deliberate departure from standard outdoor app patterns. The goal was to redesign the relationship between the user and official information — not to make discovery frictionless, but to make decision-making more reliable.
No "secret spots" or ranking logic
Removed all user-generated content and ranking features. The app surfaces only official sources — national parks, municipalities, prefectures — reducing virality risk while building trustworthiness.
Regulation as a geographic UI layer
Regulations are presented as a map layer, not a legal document. Users see what is allowed at their current location in real time — actionable, not advisory.
Understanding over passive consumption
The interface is designed to reduce ambiguity. Each regulation is displayed with its source, its geographic scope, and a plain-language summary — supporting judgment, not just compliance.
Official data only — no UGC
No community spots, no tips, no ratings. The product's value proposition is reliability and official accuracy, not engagement or social features.
From master's thesis to vibe coding experiment
This project has gone through three distinct lives.
It started in 2018 as a master's thesis — a structured research exercise that shaped the product's ethical framing and surfaced the core tension between engagement logic and responsible outdoor practice. That work was rigorous but static: a design that existed on paper, never tested in the wild.
It then sat dormant for years. That's not a failure — it's a common fate for academic work that was ahead of its tooling.
In 2023, Bivouac was revived as a design exploration. The initial research had aged well; the product direction needed grounding. That phase produced the Figma prototype visible throughout this page.
Most recently, the project became a testing ground for a different kind of question: how far can a designer push product development without traditional engineering resources? Using Figma Make, the project moved from static prototyping toward something closer to a testable, near-production interface. Not as a demo — as a form of pre-industrialization work that reduces uncertainty before engineering gets involved.
At Camptocamp, this approach has become part of how R&D exploration is structured: using vibe coding tools to validate product directions earlier, with less friction, and with a tighter feedback loop between design intent and built behavior.
Outcome & reflections
Bivouac is not a finished product. It is a design argument — that responsible product thinking starts before the first wireframe, in the choice of what not to build.
The project also reflects a broader shift in design practice: as prototyping tools gain the ability to produce testable, near-production interfaces, the boundary between design and engineering becomes a design decision in itself. Bivouac is one attempt to explore what that boundary looks like in practice.
