Core Workflows: What You Actually Do in Stone Maps
Core Workflows: What You Actually Do in Stone Maps
Features are the wrong lens for understanding an app. The right lens is workflow — what does a person actually do, in sequence, across time?
Stone Maps has four primary workflows. Here they are, described as a person experiences them rather than as a developer implements them.
Workflow 1: First Pairing
This happens once. It's the most important session.
You receive a stone — physical or virtual. If it's physical, you scan the QR code with your camera. If it's virtual, you're given a link. Either way, you land on an activation page for a specific stone that has never been paired before.
You name it. Not yourself — the stone. You give it a name. Dusk. Granite. The River. Something that feels right.
Then five questions appear, one at a time:
- A place that feels like home
- A quality you want to hold
- Something that makes you think about deep time
- A place of wonder
- What you're here for
These take time. They're meant to. You're not filling in a profile — you're doing the first act of journaling.
When you finish, the stone is yours. Your name is attached to it, the answers are attached to it, and a self-pair record is created that links you and the stone together. The app unlocks.
The Emissary knows what you wrote. It won't repeat it back at you, but it's reading your first words from here on.
Workflow 2: Daily Journaling
This is the recurring loop. It doesn't have a fixed shape — some days you write two sentences, some days nothing, some days a photograph with a single word below it.
You open the app — on your home screen if you've installed the PWA, in a browser tab if you haven't. The journal is the default view. You see what you've written before.
You write something. Text, photos, or both. The app asks if you want to geotag the entry — if you're somewhere worth remembering, you say yes. If you're somewhere neutral, you skip it.
You can make the post private (visible only to you), team (visible to your team), or public (visible on the map to anyone). The default is private.
You save it.
Some time after — usually later that day, sometimes days later — the Emissary might respond. Not always. Not reliably. When it does, its message is in the journal thread, not a notification. You find it when you come back.
That rhythm — you write, wait, the Emissary notices — is the intentional heartbeat of the app. It's slow. It's meant to be.
Workflow 3: Voice Conversation
This is less frequent, more intense.
You navigate to the Emissary page and press the microphone button. There's a connecting phase — a few seconds — while a WebRTC session is established with OpenAI's Realtime API. The Emissary's system prompt (your genesis traits, your stone's character, the conversation history) is embedded in the ephemeral key that authorizes the session.
A status dot appears: amber while connecting, then green when active.
You speak. The Emissary responds in real time — voice to voice, no text intermediary. The latency is low enough that it feels conversational. The persona is consistent with the text interface: unhurried, curious about place and time, not chatbot-cheerful.
You can mute yourself mid-conversation if you need to think. You can end the session at any point, including during the connection phase if you change your mind.
When the session ends, the transcript is saved to the conversation history. The text record becomes part of what the Emissary knows about you going forward.
This workflow is expensive (OpenAI Realtime API costs), which is one reason it's intentionally not the primary interface. The Emissary speaks more quietly and more often through text. Voice is for when you need more.
Workflow 4: Map Discovery
This is browsing, not writing.
You open the map. It renders your current area with pins for public posts — yours and strangers'. The density varies dramatically: in a city, there might be dozens in a few blocks; in a rural area, one or two in a wide radius, or none.
You pan. Posts appear and disappear as the viewport changes. You tap a pin. A preview expands: who posted it (their stone name, not their real name), when, and the first few lines of text.
You can't respond to it. You can't like it. You can read it and that's it.
This is the feature that makes the concept tangible. Seeing that someone stood on a bridge three days ago and wrote something about the quality of light on the water — that's not social media, it's evidence that attention is distributed across the world in ways you wouldn't otherwise know.
If you're in a team, you can filter the map to your team's posts, or further to a specific campaign. The institutional use case — a class documenting field sites, a group walking the same route over a season — becomes visible here.
The Shape of a Week
Most weeks, the workflow looks like this: you journal two or three times, one entry has a photo, one entry is geotagged. The Emissary sends one automated message based on your pattern. You might have a short text exchange with it. You open the map once and look around your neighborhood.
On a good week, there's also a voice session. On a quiet week, maybe just one entry.
The rhythm is irregular. That's fine. The stone doesn't track streaks or reward consistency with badges. There's no daily reminder to "keep your streak alive." You journal because a place or a moment called for it, not because an app told you to.
That philosophy is the hardest thing to design for — because most of the systems we use to build software are optimized for the opposite.