Shutupify

How do you provide solutions for increasing wellbeing and day-to-day interactions in a busy family?

By: Rina Jensen, Michael Henretty, Jasmina Tesanovic and Shashank Sriram at the Berlin Design Sprint, April 2016.

The stories of families bickering over fridges or monitoring remote family members well being brought up a general question around how you can use a better understanding of your environment as a way to foster day-to-day wellbeing in a family.

The problem space to explore than became:

How do you solve for mindful wellbeing in a family context?

Prototype Focusing

To start with the team focussed in on family dinner arguing as one of the key issues of day-to-day wellbeing in a household for busy families.

Exploring the problem

To explore the problem further the team conducted a quick brainstorm, as well as talked to a few family people at the workshop.

The problem was defined as 3 main things:

• stress
• mood changes / having a bad day
• and arguments spiralling out of control

The Solution

A device that seamlessly exists in your room that can monitor your interactions through voice recognition and sounds.

It can detect, interrupt and calm down arguments.

It does this by detecting the loudness of conversation and if too loud, it abruptly interrupts any conversation by flashing lights and loudly playing an opera singers crescendo and then followed by the decrescendo of the piece to calm the souring dings down.

Shutupify

4 design principles:

• Natural to the family environment
• Portable
• Pretty
• A lamp that seamlessly blends into the family space.

If triggered it abruptly interrupts any conversation by flashing lights and loudly playing an opera singers crescendo and then followed by the decrescendo of the piece to calm the souring dings down.

Questions we were left with:

• How would a technology interrupt an argument without becoming obnoxious?
• Can we build a series of test products that will test how empathy can be helped in technology?
• How do you create a series of solutions or platform that can build on the empathy learnings that this AI will have?