In collaboration with the danish e-textile company Ohmatex and the design agency DesignPeople from Aarhus we wanted to help women with academic performance anxiety. This kind of anxiety appears before and during presentations, tests or exams and can become an invisible disability for the person going through those feelings.
Through personal interviews with effected people we were able to empathise with their emotional state. Based on the collected knowledge we developed a workshop where we co-created possible solutions with our collaboration partners.
The 2 hour Workshop included a warm-up session where we invited the participants to empathise with the user by letting them sense different objects. We played rain sounds, let them fidget with their wallet and phone and let them smell rose water and lavender as those were the insights we had collected during the interviews with the users.
The second exercise aimed to connect the participants on a more personal level by letting each one pick two photos from the floor, one explaining a situation where they feel anxious and the other picture describing a situation they feel the opposite.
The third and main activity included the Lotus method. To ideate together as a team the group split up into two and collected as many ideas as possible on how to help women who feel anxious in performance situations.
Combining the insights and ideas from user research and workshop we saw the biggest potential in a tool that would invisibly calm down the user by providing calming breathing exercises. Because we were targeting women we decided to create different jewellery pieces that would be helpful to the user but its function would be hidden to the public.
