Project Overview
Design a physical toolkit that, through daily writing and reflection activities, helps users enhance their self-awareness and emotional management skills.
My Role
Concept development, design implementation, user testing, and iterative improvements.
Project Background & Task
Create a physical toolkit that facilitates user self-reflection, emotional recording, and management, while being easy to use on a daily basis.
Design Challenge
My task is to explore the relationship between memory and self-discovery, using the past to guide the future, and to transform this discovery into tangible design, creating a caring toolkit.
Design Process
Literature Review
Research shows that our memories change due to how they are formed and stored, often reflecting our own biases. This limits the objectivity of self-reflection. To help individuals record and review their past experiences for more comprehensive self-reflection, this project was created.
Autobiographic Memory
Brainstorming
Expert Inquiry
To address the complexities of self-awareness in my project, I conducted an online interview with a psychological consultant from China. This allowed me to incorporate established psychological counseling techniques into my design methodology.
This conversation highlighted:
The fleeting nature of memory and the importance of promptly documenting experiences.
Negative emotions often arise from our interpretations rather than the events themselves.
This understanding is key to better self-awareness and managing our reactions.
Autoethnography
To address the subjectivity of memory, I adopted the autoethnography approach - engaging in five days of self-observation.
I carefully documented every occurrence, breaking them down into emotions, events, and thoughts, then arranged these into a structured format for subsequent review and reflection.
I realised that a lot of my negativity stemmed from "expectations", but in fact I wasn't fully accepting of myself, the people around me and what was going on.
Understanding the reasons behind the emergence of negative emotions is very helpful for self-awareness.
This introspection allowed me to observe myself from an outsider's perspective, aiding particularly in pinpointing the origins of my emotions. This process revealed a gap between my past and present viewpoints on events, which could serve as a potential entry point for individuals to gain deeper self-understanding.
Interview
To determine if my personal insights were universal, I conducted interviews using directed storytelling.
These interviews emerged that deep self-reflection usually follows intense emotional experiences or significant life events, often during solitary moments.
Reflection induced changes in mindset and subtly guided future actions.
Workshop
To investigate how self-reflection can shape future actions, I conducted a workshop with 10 people structured around three primary phases:
I categorised the incidents chosen by the participants into three levels based on their controllability:
This exercise fostered deep reflection and demonstrated how self-reflection can effectively guide future behaviors. The process inspired me to consolidate these pieces of advice into the design output. The aim is to help users objectively assess situations and choose the right tool from the designed output to address their negative emotions.
Design Solution
Design Insights & Strategy
Through my design process, I envisioned a toolkit that navigates through three pivotal stages:
The parts included in the product and the cycle time.
Prototyping
Recording
Inspired by everyday receipts, I designed a medium for logging emotional life events, leading to "Grateful Receipts" for documenting three positive events daily and "Unpleasant Receipts" for negative emotions.
Instructions
I created a basic prototype including instructions for each component and reflection steps for the period after two weeks.
Tool
The tool for addressing negative emotions offers various emotion-alleviating suggestions—Calm Down, Active Shift, and Take Action—distilled from workshop insights and research, enabling users to choose suitable options after recording negative events.
Designed as Interactive, Tangible Desk Items with Layout Modifications:
Changed layout from linear to circular
Replaced icons with text for improved readability
User Testing & Iteration
During the testing phase, participants engaged with the tool for several days. I received positive feedback, but also encountered some issues, which led to the following adjustments.
“I felt your project is a great starter kit and when it comes to putting us in a habit of contemplation. It can tell you different options and you actually end up choosing one of them to calm yourself.”
“Looking back at Gragteful Receipt reminds me of the things that made me happy.”Cultivating a Recording Habit & Increasing Motivation
The primary issue was that users lacked sufficient motivation to maintain daily documentation. To foster daily engagement, I implemented the following optimisations.
Designed branding around the "Cloud" mascot, symbolizing how the water cycle represents the cyclical process of self - reflection.
Transformed receipts into concise daily entries with motivational phrases, each unique and derived from my autoethnography journey.
Compiled "My Journey Inward," detailing self-discoveries from my autoethnography.
Here is the description of what I learnt from positive and negative emotions.
Clear, Actionable Guidance
Feedback indicated the tool's advice was too abstract, lacking specific action guidance.
Transformed vague advice into concrete action cards, providing clear, immediate strategies for emotional coping.
Added a clock-style accessory to boost interactivity and user engagement.
Designed the storage approach with a new folder layout.
Introduced 14 "Reflection Receipts" for orderly daily thought review, promoting deeper introspection.
Privacy and Structured Reflection
Final Outcome
Project Impact
At my graduate show, I received numerous positive comments about Cloudloop.
One attendee noted, "Cloudloop is amazing. I mean, there are lots of toolkits on the market. But they are general. This is specific. It allows me to help myself."
Several people mentioned they would be willing to purchase such a product.
One particularly insightful comment highlighted the product's accessibility and affordability: "Not everyone has the courage or enough funds to undergo psychological counseling, but with this product, people can do it themselves."
I hope to take this project further in the future and give it the chance to genuinely improve people's mental health.
For a more detailed account of this project, including process insights and final outcomes, please visit here. Thanks for your interest.
This project was inspired by Ted Chiang’s science fiction story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.