Final Note
Team name: Never Stay Up
Team participants: Yalu Ye, Yishi Yang, Yizhou Pan
University: School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Bloomington, USA
Design Process
In this project, the team aims to design a concept that brings together users from different backgrounds for mutual benefits. At the beginning of the project, our team started from brainstorming the context where different people might be brought together. During the first round narrowing down the problem space, we decided to focus on the public places like parks, streets, libraries where people may randomly meet other people from different backgrounds. The second round expansion and contraction, we came up with every pieces of ideas we can think of the public places. And after grouping all the post-it notes, discussion and several rounds voting, we had our design core-help people relieve stress through sharing moods in the public context.
The next step we started to do a lot research online and generate concepts under our problem space. We also brought constrains to our design ideas: (1) The contexts are the public places, which means we need to consider both the target audience and people out of this range (2) We need to solve the problem by bring certain social aspects (3) We need to consider the approriate environment for our target user group-stressful people.
We did a lot sketches and several rounds discussion and voting. We thought about using media like sound, light, water, dancing, stress balls, step faces, writing digital messages and etc. At last we decided to using light as media for people to share moods in a quiet and relax environment.
Personas and Scenario
Rebeca works as a secretary in a company. The secretary job is not easy. She has to remember and arrange all her boss’s events, pick up coming phone calls, dealing with appointments from all kinds of people. She is so busy with this job and get no time to do things she enjoy. She loves painting and will practice it whenever she has time. Become an artist is her dream but she really has no choice. Her salary is just enough to let her pass through the days and her sister is depending on her for the high school tuition. She feels so much stress.
Ben is a novel writer. He just began this career and had several books done. He loves to spend his time writing and thinking. However, when it comes to find a suitable publisher, he encountered challenges. Publishers does not recognize his writing and he really needs to find a way to pay his bills. He is so stressful and wants to go out for a walk.
Final Concept
Mood Petal is a public facility for people to relieve their stress and sharing mood. It is a space composed of several petal-like beds. People lie down on the beds to participant. By choosing their current mood, a bunch of light will appear which has a color that is consistent with the mood on the ceiling above the.The bed allows people to interact with the light and other people. By playing with the light they relieve their stress and have a social moment with others. Besides, people can tell from the color to see which person is not in a good mood and comfort them with the light playing.
Main Interaction
Before people start to lay down in the Mood Petal, they need to set a mood which is transferred to a bunch of specific color light in the screen on the top of the space. The light will be interact with other light according to the music. And then people can see color light of other people and interact with each other through gestures.
Research
We did a lot research about how people handle their stress and the art pieces in the public space. Detailed research can be found in previous posts.
Design Rationale
Nowadays, people who work in the big cities are under so much pressure from different aspects of life like work, family, study, finance and relationship. Sometimes it is hard for people to relieve their stress either because there is no time or the relationship does not permit. Our design is a easy way that helps people relieve their tension in the public space while at the same time does not bother other people nearby them. The design enables strangers come together help each other resolve tension, get relaxed and have a better mood.
We want to make the interactions between people less personal and more subtle since it’s a public space. It’s hard for strangers come together and comfort each other. Through our design, people who don’t know each other will come together share their moods using a more subtle and less personal way.
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