Bloom began inside a four-product portfolio for New York Life. The brief called for a product definition for soft legacy. The research outpaced the design, and the deliverable became a working website — a prompt browser, an audio archive, and an instrument the team kept testing with. What follows reads from the artifact backward.
A refined concept deck for a SteerCo. A vision sentence, a set of features, a build-buy-partner recommendation. The clean, end-of-phase deliverable.
A working website. The research was carrying weight a deck couldn't: eighteen recorded conversations, a prompt taxonomy the team kept extending. Browsable and memorable.
The design was invitation. We developed two axes to ensure the questions were comprehensive when taken in sum. The arenas came from where people actually locate their stories. The moments came from developmental psychology, aligned to how people frame their own lives in narrative.
Axis 1 · Moments · mindset as one moves through an arena of life: Core Values, Defining Milestones, Overcoming Obstacles.
Axis 2 · Life Arenas · dimensions of life lived: Childhood, Traditions, Relationships, Career, Influences.
The prompts were drafted in-house, using the arena-and-moment vocabulary as a working structure. About a hundred all told, of which any given participant answered six: one from each moment across two arenas, choosing which to answer for themselves and which to take to a relative.
The recordings are personal. Participants spoke about first heartbreaks, parents, the homes they left, the children they raised.
The cards below are real entries from the archive. If you have a reason to listen, write — access is on a per-clip basis with participants in the loop.
Request access to the archive →Bloom made the case that a product does not summarize a family's legacy; it holds a room for stories to be heard and re-encountered. The taxonomy became the working language for that room, and it kept working after Phase 1 closed. It traveled into research instruments outside the original program, and the concept brief carried its vocabulary rather than filing an appendix.
Read backward from the artifact, the brief looks different. Soft legacy isn't a feature set. It's a practice.
“Everyone has got family stories. If you talk to families, tell them there is a simple thing they can do to make their kids resilient — tell their stories.”
— Marshall P. Duke · Psychology, Emory