6 designs that reimagine how we interact with software

Seemingly small interactions like pinch-to-zoom, tap-to-like, and swipe right have become ubiquitous, shaping the way we think, feel, and connect. This year's Figma Make-a-thon, in partnership with Contra, asked builders to imagine the next wave of software interactions—and push familiar ones in unexpected directions.

Awarded a total of $100,000 in prizes, the winning projects don’t just give us new ways to interact with software; they allow us to imagine new ways of connecting with each other. From a way to use facial gestures to navigate interfaces, to an immersive 16-bit world, these Makes show how play, creativity, and craft define digital experiences.

A collaborative embroidery sampler

Winner: Best Overall

Charlota Blunárová got the idea for Common Thread from the centuries-old needlework tradition of creating samplers—practice cloths that are passed down, stitched over, and added to over time. Common Thread brings that same spirit online: Visitors pick a thread color, choose a stitch type, and leave their mark on a shared canvas alongside strangers. “In an era where every tool is about speed and scale, the constraint is the point,” Charlota says. “There’s just one patch of canvas for everyone who comes.” Over 100,000 stitches later, the multiplayer sampler is still growing.

Charlota, who has “zero engineering knowledge,” vibe coded the project in Figma Make during one afternoon, working with the tool to generate real-time collaboration features and interactive canvas controls. From there, she created the logo and color palettes directly in Figma and pasted them into Make as visual references. “Figma Make changes who gets to ship things,” Charlota says. “Now that people of all backgrounds can prototype their ideas and push them into the world, my hope is that the internet gets a little more whimsical and fun again.”

A kiss instead of a click

Winner: New Interaction

For many of us, tapping a screen feels instinctual. But Aleyna Çatak has “busy hands,” she says. “I don’t like interrupting the flow of knitting, crocheting, baking, cooking, or designing. The notifications, context switching, and screen tapping all break immersion. Voice commands never felt natural to me.” So, she dreamt up a new way to interact with devices. Through Figma Make, Aleyna landed on Pucker, which allows users to navigate with head movements and pucker their lips to confirm a selection. No hands or speech required.

“Figma Make really accelerated the execution of my idea,” says Aleyna, who built Pucker in a day. “Even with a time constraint, I was able to bring the idea to life in a way that felt complete and expressive.” Pucker isn’t a product, she says, but a “flexible interaction layer” that can stretch across many different use cases, apps, and platforms. Aleyna envisions Pucker being adopted for more accessible design. “I'd love for this to become something people do instinctively, without thinking about it, just like we don't think about tapping anymore,” she says. “Good design is invisible.”

Experiment with Aleyna's community file here

A photo booth without walls

Winner: Reimagining Iconic Interactions

The iconic photo booth has gone through little change since its invention in the 1920s. Paige Latimer, however, broke it out of the constraints of time and space. Duet Booth lets two people snap photos remotely and asynchronously, then stitches them together into a single strip, as if they'd been sitting side-by-side.

Paige is a self-described photography nerd, especially when it comes to film. “Photo booths turned photography into something more accessible, immediate, and shared,” she says. “I wanted to explore how that could exist in a digital space, where you can still create and share something together, even if you're not physically in the same place.” This meant tackling complex technical challenges—live camera feeds, compositing, syncing two people in real time. Figma Make let her focus on the experience rather than the engineering. “It let me stay in a creative flow and iterate quickly, which felt really important for something this interaction-driven,” she says.

An instrument that pushes back

Winner: Boundary Pushing

As a hobbyist music producer and DJ, Lee Black wanted to push music software beyond buttons and sliders. With Airwwave, an instrument that uses your camera to translate hand motions into ambient soundscapes, he aimed to create something expressive and accessible—something anyone could pick up regardless of musical background. The sound is designed to respond to your gestures without fully obeying them. “I wanted the experience to feel alive,” says Lee. “You’re feeling the music with your hands rather than controlling it with knobs, and the sound is pushing back. You’re in a dance with it.”

Figma Make removed the typical lag between concept and working prototype, letting him sketch interactions, test them, and rebuild them in a single sitting. He started by using Make as a thinking partner, shaping the gesture engine and core behaviors before building anything visual. “Airwwave isn't something you can wireframe properly,” he says. “You have to feel it working.” Finding the right balance between randomness and intention was the biggest challenge. Sounds needed to trigger at varying intervals and crossfade naturally. Gesture sensitivity was another puzzle: Too responsive, and it feels chaotic. Not responsive enough, and the connection breaks. But the payoff came when small hand movements started shifting space and tone in ways that felt organic. “That's when it stopped being a tool and started feeling like the sound was alive in the air,” he says.

A digitized Tokyo you can get lost in

Winner: Excellence in Craft

In Kiel Cole's interactive, 16-bit rendition of Tokyo, you can wander through streets, order ramen from an Ichiran-style menu, flip through vinyl in a record store, or just take in the ambient sounds of the city. There are no timers or progress bars—just a world to wander at your own pace. “The interaction I wanted to create was one with no objective,” Kiel says. “I hope people will feel the way I felt walking through Tokyo—curious and completely present in the moment. The food, the arcades, the energy of the streets at night—I wanted to pay homage to all of it, but through a more futuristic, stylized lens.”

Each of the immersive storefronts in Kiel’s Tokyo has a custom soundtrack that she produced, along with ambient audio and interactive details, like an arcade with working claw machines. Figma Make was the first tool he'd used that could actually handle this level of complexity. “It never felt like I was fighting the tool,” she says. “It was fun and refreshing in a way that kept me pushing further instead of scaling back.”

Experiment with Kiel's community file here

A tool that turns screenshots into something worth sharing

Winner: Fan Favorite

Paste a screenshot of your design into Reframe and you’ll see it laid out 28 different ways, each one polished and ready to share. Dann Petty built the tool in Figma Make after finding himself repeatedly sharing raw screenshots of finished work. He craved a way to share his work that felt as considered as the work itself. “We spend all this time crafting UI and then share it without thinking about how we're sharing it,” Dann says. “Reframe was born from that friction.”

Within hours, Dann had a working prototype for Reframe. “Figma Make was genuinely the reason this project exists,” he says. The hardest part was restraint. An app like Reframe could easily balloon with features, especially with the ease of building in Make, so keeping it simple had to be a priority from the start.

The most fun was designing the 28 templates for the grid view, each one built to capture what Dann describes as “that moment where the frame clicks into place and suddenly your screenshot looks like something you'd put on a portfolio.” The whole process felt less like solo building and more like collaborating with an actual developer, Dann says.

Honorable mentions go to Keita Saito's GestureBeat, a hand-tracked rhythm sequencer, Double Glitch's Wipe It, which lets you erase text with a real-world swipe gesture, and Arwa Alharbi's Let's Play Figma, an interactive game that teaches Figma through play.

Learn about last year’s winners and explore more Figma Make projects. Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's Make-a-thon—we can't wait to see what you build next.