Project Type: Design Project Project Category: Social Inclusion & Physical Rehabilitation Study year: 2 semester A
Abstract: The Bascule is an organization for psychiatric help to children, adolescents, and their parents in and around Amsterdam. Adolescents who are following treatment for their illness can contact this department 24/7 for online and offline coaching to lower their stress levels. They will be coached and can practice their coping skills. At ‘020’ there are different rooms where the adolescents can pull back. My team and I were given the task to design the "chill-out" room with the use of the latest technology and optimize this room as a place to distress. The current room was a simple room with a hammock and a guitar. Patients went in that room and basically had not a lot to do, besides reading or listening to music.
The scope of this project was rather broad as a complete room had to be re-designed. We did research, user interviews, and went through the design process. The outcome was a totally different room. For the control of the whole room, we chose the design of a fidget cube. Because its purpose is already to calm stressed people down, we thought the design would fit the purpose of the room. Besides that, the client mentioned preferring not to have a clinical feeling. You can personalize the room with a set of colors, playing videos and watching photos. All are carefully pre selected to be calming. However, all these features are quite passive. During the user interviews, we found that many patients like to hold something soft. Something like a pillow or toy. That is why we designed a pillow with a glowing light. The light gets brighter and dims at a pace that is the same as the ideal breathing pattern. Trying to sync your breathing pattern with the pattern of the pillow enables you to actively calm down. We measured the heartbeats of test persons before and after using the pillow, and the results were very interesting (see photo below).