Project Title Balanced.
Class Name Design Research Project
Date of Completion 11/29/2019
My Role Art Director
Summary Balanced. is an organization focused on promoting a healthy work/life balance that I designed in the final year of my degree. It is an integrated ecosystem focused on providing a healthier schedule for those that tend to overwork themselves.
Project Challenge
Possible header photo: Waving/animated Ish with the balanced. logo Overwork is dangerous for not only your mental health but your physical health as well. working more than 55 hours a week raises the risk of heart attack and stroke. At this point in time, overworking yourself can officially be a cause of death. Something needs to be done. The challenge lies in ‘What’ and ‘How’? How do we change the way a whole society perceives work/life balance in an appealing way, especially when the target audience is most likely too busy to go through and set up a whole system?
Strategy/Methodology Show pic of Ish
Using myself and my own experiences as a key target audience, I realized that the most important aspect of Balanced. had to be a simple entry point. A simple voice command system in the form of a smart speaker program would be necessary and from there, the rest flowed. The system would be wrapped around the central character of a little AI robot named Ish.
Ish can be likened to a little assistant that lives inside the user’s phone. It helps plan the user’s day, sends messages to ask how the user is feeling, sends the user on forced breaks and is the face of the Balanced system.
Show Ish screens
Design Process Identification Conceptualization Ideation Show ideation/drafts of Ish Show logo ideation (sketches and final)
brand ideation Production Revision & Feedback Deliverables
Solution/Contribution Show images of the completed booklet, al stages of the ecosystem Balanced has been developed to become a foil that fits snugly around the user’s life. At the beginning of integration, Balanced studies the user’s day to day activities using the deliverables that will be described in the coming pages.
This sounds like a lot, but Balanced knows that not everyone has the time to set a whole system up, so it has been designed with the intention of ease of access. Balanced will bring awareness to the issue of overwork and what it does to an individual’s mental and physical health. It will impact the way that people value their time and themselves as a person and deconstruct the idea that overworking oneself is admirable.
Balanced is an app, a smart speaker, a website, a watch integration, a friend, a secretary and a resource. Takeaways - This project taught me a lot about the design process from start to finish and also showed me that everything starts from a poor looking sketch but end well depending on the amount of effort and skill you put in.