Solace

We conducted interviews with 5 spiritual leaders, in order to get a firm understanding of where the field of meditation sat and the challenges that they were facing. Key findings include:

• Learning to meditate is a problem for newcomers.
• We coach meditation through ceremonies, but you could teach it through biofeedback.
• Focusing on the breath is a common technique when learning to meditate.

After identifying 'newcomers' as our target audience, we interviewed 10 individuals who were interested in exploring meditation as a solution to solve stress, anxiety & trauma. Key findings include:

• I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me.
• When I'm fragile, I don't want to leave my safe space.

These findings led us to believe that there was a gap in the market for a product, for the home, that enables individuals to find Solace.

In order to validate the concept, we created a prototype that made use of a wearable and tested it on 20+ individuals to ensure that it met its promise.

This allowed us to discover that each individuals breath is different and that a calibration process was required in order for the experience to meet its vision.

We leveraged Design Delight class to lean on the guidance of leading experiential artist, Emilie Baltz, in the creation of a pop-up event for people to experience Solace.

We used Solidworks to produce the design of the final product and partnered with Shapeways to produce the lamp. The 16 piece package was put together using gorilla glue, polished with layers of resin and finished with a coat of paint.

We designed and developed a 3 part system that calibrated the experience to an individual, transformed their breath into light and collected the datapoints behind each breath - so that they could later re-live the moment. The three part system can be broken down into the following:

• An arduino driven wearable that uses a conductive rubber cord to measure the width of an diaphragm. The wearable made use of an Adafruit Trinket, which was paired with a Bluefruit for Bluetooth communication.
• An bluetooth powered iOS app that was in charge of being the center of communication between the wearable and the lamp. The app also held the invitations and collected the each individuals breath, as data-points across time. Upon finishing the experience, the iOS app sent the data-points to a Firebase backend, that was used to allow individuals to recreate their breath.
• An arduino driven light bulb, which made use of Bluetooth to recieve data points and transform them into light.

We created clothing, invitations, rented out space and produced all the elements for a Manhattan pop up for individuals to experience solace.

We are grateful for Karen Vallensky for helping us host the event and Joshua Corn for having filmed the experience.

Upon leaving the event, each individual was given a card where they were invited to re-live their experience. This microsite made use of the datapoints that had been gathered on a Firebase backend to recreate the breath in the form of an expanding and contracting circle.

This circle behaved in a manner that matched the users breath at the time of the event. It's purpose: to allow users to practice Solace after the event, with the hope that it could help them to achieve the same effects.

Given the expensive nature of the product we created a smaller, portable version envisioned for the general public. This product was known as Lumi.

In order to meet the demand of the Spiritual Leaders whom had aided us in the development of Solace, we envisioned Solace as a platform. This platform made use of Lumi to allow users to share their breaths and meditate together.