LOME

Problem Space

Team Perspective

Nowadays, society and workplace pressure on people is becoming a general phenomenon. Pressure people experience daily might come from intensified workload, continuous pursuit of perfection, obsession with completion, difficulty balancing family, work and personal life, becoming social extrovert, etc. Balancing work and family, so as to better manage emotions and maintain close family relationships, is what our project aims to solve.

The target audiences we expect for our design are people are having problems of dealing with their emotion in their working life or school life and they do not want to bring those negative mood outside to families. In this case, people who are not good at dealing with negative emotions from work or study and want to learn how to manage their own emotions will become the people we design for.

Individual Perspective

People are easily getting stuck in a negative mood and hard to get out, even there was something great happened. The purpose of the LOME is to avoid people bring the negative mood from their work to families. At the same time, some people will suppress or cover their feelings when they met unpleasant things and they even do not know. In this case, the LOME can detect the words that users said to tell the users their present emotions.

However, it is hard to recognise emotions because of complexity. Words are given more meaning depending on the situation and mood of use, which makes monitoring meaningless. We also want users to have more physical interaction with the LOME. In addition, through research, negative words contain more distinct emotions. Therefore, it is the current solution to only monitor such words with obvious negative meanings.

Intended Form

Team Perspective

We expect that users can mark their present feelings when they come back home to let other family members no matter they are at home already or just arrive at home to know. And users can also notice they are in a bad mood which is needed to express out especially some bad attitudes to the LOME. We hope that the interactions with LOME will help users re-born their emotions from negative to positive, even they are going to share their tough experiences with their families they will share in a positive way.

We hope that through the red petals and the hints provided by LOME when necessary, users can actively realise their negative emotions and vent them so as to better manage their own emotions.

Individual Perspective

A cute cartoon flower shape, the petals can be pressed, feels like some pressure-relief toys. The LOME can detect “bad words/phrases”, and will change the colour of petals when it detects “bad words/phrases”. If there are more than half of the petals being red, the LOME will notify users that they may be in a bad or stressed mood and need to relief. Users can come to the LOME and play with the LOME, like pressing the petals. Identify keywords can visually remind (colour, voice) user they may have a bad mood, let people to recognise their own emotions, and through some simple part for people to release the mood of the interaction process, when people are aware of the negative emotional need to vent, and family communication or find some of my favourite thing to do would help.