Junior

'Featured on core77'

"With a proper breathing pattern, one is able to influence the coherency of the heart rhythm. A response to a coherent heart rate is more control of our emotional brain which results in an improvement of the state-of-mind."

- Dr. David Servan-Schreiber

When you share your breath with Junior, you can see a light wave going through his body. This reflection is inspired by yoga and meditation principles. It visualizes the balance and the energy that one gets by deeply inhaling.

Junior becomes more attached to you, the more you interact with him. Junior follows you around the space. If you try to hide your face from Junior, he will quickly react, and try to find you.

Junior gets weak if you stop sharing your breath with him. He falls asleep.

Junior's head contains a hacked webcam, microphone, temperature sensor and a LED. Because of these sensors, Junior is able to interact with people in an intelligent way:

Experience-centered

The initial project brief aims at stimulating breathing techniques as a way to relax. With such a broad project scope, I saw opportunities to explore a new ‘experience-centered’ design approach. In short, this design process is characterized by envisioning new experiences in order to infiltrate the user’s life. This is a hands-on process in which I explore strong emotional reactions and expression with a set of rapid-prototypes. Because of these interactive prototypes, the new interaction slowly takes form. In this design approach, the product is just a means of accomplishing the action “stimulating breathing exercises”. In the interaction with people, the product obtains it meaning.

In order to shift perspective to different users and experiences on stress in the future, I looked at previous trends. By creating a timeline of the past, present and future, I envisioned new futuristic scenarios.

Emotion + Motivation = Best Interaction

The existing products on the market are effective and accurate, however they are very user unfriendly as they require the user to focus for 15 minutes, 3 times a day on a small display.

Junior’s interaction is based on the idea that emotion and motivation gives the best natural interaction. Fascination is the emotional drive for the natural interaction between Junior and the user. I created a simple smoke-box as an inspirational exploration. The light waves flowing through Junior’s body are reflected from this experience prototype.

In order to complete the emotional layer between the user and the object, I programmed Junior’s behavior and movement to be natural, yet alive and playful.