vector illustrated line of data visualizations

AURA CONCEPT WEARABLE

social mood tracking for emotional health, 2015

Aura was a concept project to design a product and its digital interface, touching on user research, persona and scenario development, market strategy, formal product design, system architecture, wireframing, and user interface design.

The product is a biometrics-based wearable that tracks and applies mood data to interpersonal relationships and vice versa. The system displays visualizations of this information via OLED screen jewelry. In spirit, its a high tech mood ring.

LED screen jewelry prototypes piled together

system diagram

Aura's top-level components are the LED jewelry, a smartphone app, and an optional stick-on finger-based sensor. Through the smartphone's microphone, the system listens for mood indicators such as tonal stress or laughter.

The stick-on circuit senses electrodermal activity, a physiological stress and excitement indicator. The app occasionally prompts for manual confirmation of mood status. All this raw data is aggregated and then visualized on the jewelry.

I spent several hours trying to untangle this in mind-mapping software, but this tiered version was the arrangement that communicated best.

The technology in this project is near-future - between five and ten years, realistically, for the OLED screens (which can take the beveled gem shape) and the skin-based sensor circuit.

experience goals

emotional literacy, system modularity, and pleasure & relevance

insights from user research are than moods are subjective, our relationships are evidence-based and interpersonal interaction has an outside impact on mood

competitors fall into either novelty or data-heavy space

matrix showing competitors along axes of social-private and novelty-quantified self, including concept products

matrix showing competitors along axes of social-private and novelty-quantified self, excluding concepts

UI flowchart

fifteen interface screen designs for a smartphone app, with lines showing how the user would nagivate between them

⇩ gestures start here

Interface Style Guide

product (the gems)

The idea here was that a user could feed different visualizations to differently sized and housed gems - so you might have one displaying your mood and another showing your partner's. The cases play with different materialities and engraving.

I tried to design a piece of technology that could be precious, not because it's expensive in the way an iphone is precious, but because it's beautiful and meaningful.

photo is of the jewelry prototypes arranged in a line

This is a humble placeholder composite until I am able to shoot the dozens of formal iterations. I did almost all of the prototyping on the lasercutter, including the final pieces, which were then hand-polished to achieve a bevel.

The hinged and engraved versions came out of researching the history of jewelry and pocketwatch design, per the criteria of designing for long-term value. This composite also shows some of the evolution of the data visualization.

a layout of the iterations of the product - foam, clear acrylic, and some hinged versions

a row of line drawings modulating the shapes

orthographic drawing of one of the large gems

data visualization (the mood constellation)

It was important to me that the app include a traditional data visualization (a graph) for viewing the mood data as well as the abstract version. That said, the data constellation is intended to be something a user would quickly learn to interpret.

New data appears in the center and fades outwards so that a glance can give you immediate history of the past few hours as well as a snapshot of the whole week, for example.