The Painting Project
The Challenge
Design a low-tech wellbeing toolkit to help a target user to create good habits to improve their general wellbeing by 1% each day for 100 days. To select my target user and their wellbeing problems, I selected various attributes from a selection of cards. There were 8 different categories to select cards from: their gender, age, ethnicity, relationship status, education, wellbeing issues, how they like instructions and their annual income.
How can I use design in order to improve a person's wellbeing?
User persona
User personas are fictional people a designer invents that mimic the people the product is aimed at. A designer selects the user’s interests, age, nationality and more to make it accurate to their target audience. User personas are useful as they allow the designer to market their product easily and this can make the process more accurate. However, they have a limitation that the designer could design a product too specific to their user persona and discourage other users.
My user persona for my wellbeing toolkit was Tonia Lin, an interior design who graduated from Brighton University at 21. She struggled to become an interior designer, so she works in a bar. She is 23 years old and an immigrant from Singapore with English as a second language, her first being Tamil. She earns £13,000 annually and struggles with anxiety and loneliness.
Idea Development
First, I created some initial sketches for both of my toolkits centred around yoga cards and various crafts to help with my user’s anxiety. Developing on from this, I moved onto designs within the packaging and strap, inspiring all four logos. My packaging in toolkit 1 was simplistic so I added a tote bag and coconut oil which led to a larger, hexagon-shaped box to be created. I combined my original yoga card designs together, altered the packaging design with subtle detail and selected my final logo design.
With my user’s anxiety in mind, my focus turned to calming activities in toolkit 2. Choosing to include a paint-by-numbers kit, I designed a box with multiple compartments for neat storage. This kit became an inspiration point for the set of logos. I decided to add more such as various paintings and a decoupage set and I decided to change my box design as my original box idea was flimsy. I then developed my design for my box. For my final stage, I chose my logo and added extra text to my box exterior. From this process I learnt that my original ideas were too simple and found that my ideas changed a lot during this process showing me that my original ideas wouldn’t have worked. However, I think I finished this process with solid ideas that could all work for my user well.
Colour
For my colour scheme for this project, I decided to use pastel colours as these colours have calming connotations. This was important in my design process because I needed to pick colours that would help soothe my user and keep them calm.
Reflection
I enjoyed focusing on a project that centred around mental health because I think it’s a very important topic and as designers, we can help people deal with their mental health through activities such as toolkits. I think that my final creation is successful because it’s rendered to my user’s mental health issues and personality as well as being able to fit into their schedule. I think that my user would be excited to engage in my toolkit because it incorporates her love for being creative and it was made with her interests in mind.
The moment that I felt was the most significant learning moment was developing my initial sketches from rough ideas to fully-fledged ideas. This was significant as it taught me that development is the utter most important thing in a design process, and it can take your work to the next level. I think that my skills have improved throughout this project because I’ve learnt a lot more about why we do each section of the design process and how it makes a project more developed. I think that I met all the learning outcomes as my user can use her skills in an art class (Connect), use her painting kit each day (Active), learn how to do new activities like decoupage (Keep Learning), see her progress (Take Notice) and she can also use her art skills as gifts for family and friends (Give).