A stack of pebbles is metaphorical to the balance one must have with the inner self. ‘Pebbles’ is a desk piece to help desk bound working professionals with mindfulness and emotional regulation.
Award Winner
Taiwan International Student Design Competition
My Role
Led the 3 member design team through solutioning, insight identification and product design
Key Area
Sensory Design, Haptics, Dirty Prototyping and concept refinement
Target Audience
Desk bound working professionals
The problem space
Self Energy Management is about being aware of how much mental and physical energy you have throughout your day to do your planned activities. The number of hours in a day is fixed but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. Hence managing energy and not time is the key to high performance and personal renewal. No matter how well you schedule your time, if you don’t have the personal energy to fulfil your commitments things may not get done.
The Insight
Provocations that disrupt an important or central goal are more likely to elicit ruminative activity. In our case- disruption of focus during work.
Management of emotions can be done in two ways:
1. Regulating the reaction
2. Suppressing emotions
However, most organisational cultures or the social code of conduct do not allow for open expression of such pent-up emotions.
Practices that run counter to an individual’s coping mechanism can eventually lead to:
Burnout
Spillover of emotions to other areas of life
Personal Alienation
We used this matrix to conduct a study amongst a mixed group of participants. Each participant was instructed to plot themselves on a graph of energy levels to emotions associated with work. Emotions before starting work were to be kept in mind to understand people’s approach towards their work.
The study of work approach shows the responses of multiple participants scattered almost uniformly. However, it is interesting to note how a cluster forms towards the centre of the graph, signifying almost neutral intensity/energy levels with neutral emotions associated with it. Most importantly, our hypothesis about people feeling negative about their work was validated as a majority lies on the negative of the emotion axis (x-axis).
The Result: Hypothesis Validation
The Energy Quadrants Matrix validated our hypothesis of most people having negative feelings towards work, making the graph plot skewed towards the survival zone
A stack of pebbles is metaphorical to the balance one must have with their inner self. This is a product meant to serve as a desk piece that detects one’s emotions and helps overcome negative feelings in a meditative fashion.
Three primary emotions that are catered to via this are:
1. Irritation
2. Anxiety
3. Sadness
Each of these emotions are catered to by variable interactions.
Pebble for Irritation/Frustration: Turns cold when held, to help a person “cool down”
Pebble for Anxiety: Breaks into 3 pieces to fidget with
Pebble for Sadness/Upset: Calms by providing a low frequency meditative vibration
Along with light as visual cues to pick the relevant pebble up, the clinking of the pebbles against one another create a tactile induced auditory experience that is delightful.
Curbing sensory overload through tactile and auditory engagement
Along with light as visual cues to pick the relevant pebble up, the clinking of the pebbles against one another create a tactile induced auditory experience that is delightful.
For faster product refinement, I designed many unique dirty prototype tests to gather localised insights.
The users held the pebbles with both hands to feel the full surface of the pebbles, nudging the concept to have full palm sized pebbles
Tactile interaction with the pebbles varied according to material and texture, resulting in the decision to have 3 unique materials to solve for each emotion
Slower, steadier and pulsating vibration feedback was perceived as calming for the sadness stone
