Calmily - a product family to help people suffering from anxiety by Haavard Ingolf Holme, Alice Mingotti, Jielin Chen and Julie Maria Pedersen

During the whole process we included and collaborated with potential users in the process of creating a product that they felt would possibly help them living with anxiety. We contacted 6 people with anxiety that we already knew, but also hospitals, psychologists and anxiety organisations. The reason why we wanted to work with people we already knew prior was because anxiety can be a touchy subject and therefore we found it easier to talk to people we know, and knew they could trust us.

Our final solution as a product family consisting of a balancing board, a charging pad and a watch. The reason why we decided on making a family of products instead of just one is because we learned during our research that how an anxiety attack feels and what helps to prevent one is quite personal and one solution can't help everyone. The main differences we saw were that some people had to distract their mind to overcome a panic attack, and for them the balancing board would work the best, but for others they needed to meditate and try to calm themselves and for them the charging pad and the watch would help. The balancing board works by trying to balance a small ball into the middle of the waves on the board. But the board is open for interpretation and could be played however you want.

The watch has a textured band that you can feel to try to distract yourself when you feel a panic attack coming. The tactile sense is the last sense to get weakened during an anxiety attack. One of the most common techniques to get out of an anxiety attack is to focus on your own breathing. This was something we implemented into the watch. On the crown of the watch there is a button and if you push this a breathing indicator will light up at the watch dial.

The charging pad has a speaker and a table lamp implemented in it. The lamp has the same function as the breathing indicator on the watch but can also be used as a regular lamp. The speaker works with friends, family and pedagogues can leave an uplifting message on the speaker through a website. When the person with anxiety feels an anxiety attack coming or they need an uplifting message they can activate the speaker and the speaker will start reading the messages. This will also help if they feel lonely going through anxiety disease. The charging pad can also recharge the watch.

After showing and discussing the design proposals to the end users, we got quite overwhelmed by their reactions. Anxiety is a sensitive and personal matter, and you could feel from their responses that it meant a lot that we worked on trying to help them with such a sensitive subject. This project made us truly feel that design can help people suffering from mental illness in a gentle way. We also learned how important it is for a designer to be empathetic and understand our users conditions and their needs going through a mental illness. And through field research and probing getting to know the individual persons on a deeper level so we can co-create the best solution together with them.