An initiative of Back Room Strategies

Flânerie.

Apps for the world right in front of you.

Three appsOne question of attention

A definition

flâ·ne·rie

flah-nuh-REE · noun, French

Flânerie is a French word for the practice of attentive strolling — moving slowly enough through the world to actually see it. The term came out of 19th-century Paris by way of Baudelaire and was sharpened by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project into a small philosophy of attention: that what’s around you is worth looking at, that looking takes time, and that habit is a form of blindness from which one has to be slowly recalled.

The apps under Project Flânerie are built in that spirit. Each one picks a different kind of looking — at public art, at the perceptual frame itself, at color in the world — and gives you a reason to do it. They aren’t productivity tools or wellness tools. They are small inducements to attend to where you are.

The apps · Three arches

Three thresholds you walk through.

Each app frames a different kind of looking. Each is its own piece of work, with its own constraints and its own ritual. The arch is the threshold — what you cross when you decide to attend.

Urban Gallery

Public art on the ground

A field guide to the public art of every city. Sculptures, murals, installations, monuments — drawn from city open-data portals, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons, expanded by Patrons who add what they walk past.

Tell it how long you have, where you’re starting, and where you’re going. It builds the route.

  • Half a million pieces, tens of thousands of cities, more than 200 countries
  • Walking or biking; start to end
  • Free on Google Play and the App Store
Visit Urban Gallery

umwelt

A quiet noticing prompt

When you’ve been scrolling for a while, Umwelt sends a single small question. Outward, never inward — about what you can see, hear, smell, or touch, not how you feel.

The name is Jakob von Uexküll’s 1909 word for the slice of reality an organism actually perceives.

  • 450+ questions across 23 contexts
  • Sees only that an app is on screen, never inside
  • Free on Google Play; umwelt+ is a one-time $4.99 unlock
Visit umwelt

Haishoku

Three colours a day

A daily camera-based colour game. Three colours arrive each morning, drawn from a century of colour theory beginning with Sanzo Wada’s 1933 work. Point the phone at the world; the reticle warms toward the target.

The day closes with a settled chord when all three are found. Tomorrow, new colours.

  • Triads filtered for protan, deutan, tritan vision
  • Camera samples colour in real time; no photos saved
  • Free on Google Play and the App Store
Visit Haishoku

Underneath

A shared question.

All of Flânerie’s apps ask the same thing in their own way: given a limited window of attention, what’s worth directing it toward? Each answers differently — by mapping the public art you’d otherwise walk past, by asking a single question, by giving you a colour to find.

An engine, extracted

Saunteur.

The thinking underneath Urban Gallery’s walking tours turned out to be concrete enough to lift out of the app and treat as its own project. Saunteur is that engine — currently powering Urban Gallery’s tours, currently being generalised to power whatever Flânerie does next.

Read about Saunteur →

From the practice

Project Flânerie is one of three initiatives of Back Room Strategies.

The apps are made by Seth Palmer Harris, the firm’s principal. To know when a new app launches, write directly.