Case Study: Stress Relief

It all started out with brainstorming things that we enjoyed. Our subjects ranged from music, outdoor activities, to art and more. We did a series of votes throughout the process of brainstorming to narrow the list of subjects down to six. After our final vote, we landed on “food & wine” as the subject to move forward with. Once we decided on “food & wine”, we began to list out anything we knew about it. Ideas of places, people, opinions, combinations of brands, personal experiences, and more emerged. From here on we began our secondary (away from the source) research and began method planning in how we can uncover a problem.

Full case study can be found here

After finding "food and wine" as a topic of research, we began to break off and do mass amounts of online research to further understand the subject and find problem subjects within it. The key point we discovered was that millennials drink more wine than previous generations. So we decided to find out why they did that. We began researching correlations between millennials and wine, the psychology behind that, and millennials in Indiana.

We combined a few ideas and ended up “prototyping” a planetarium like room that has large cushions on the floor and relaxing music playing. We then created a rough demo video of what the project and audio could possibly sound like. We took these two new tools and quickly tested them. During this testing phase, we had 27 individuals give feedback on our sketch and rough video/audio. With this feedback, we were then able to refine our final solution with an ideal solution and internment solution. With the feedback, we realized that many didn't find bean bags to be enough for seating and the music we had used wasn't calming enough, so those are two main changes we made in our ideal/internment solutions.

Soft and relaxing music

Projections on the walls and ceilin

Soft cushions over the floor

Our ideal solution would be a room that would have been built with academic stress relief in mind. This would happen during a building’s construction. It is a planetariumesque room that has a three-tier pitted floor with a domed ceiling above. When entering this room, you would be on the upper most tier that contains couches and individual viewing cubbies in the full round of the room (this doesn’t mean the room is circular) for viewing. This tier would be wide enough to contain two seating options and room enough to walk. The middle tier would contain oversized bean bags as the lounging option, plus walking space. The lower tier will be for individuals who would like the ability to lay down and view the video that will be planning above.

Well this solution provides options on many platforms, and those options are all left to the individual to choose. Customization is a primary key to the experience’s success. There are options on what to view, how to view it, and if you want it to be a group or individual experience. It is a space that a person can go to and take a break from the outside world, escape, relax and recharge. To escape reality, to go to a separate space deemed just for that purpose, neither home nor really in a learning setting. This is the solution we've come up with from the information gathered by dozens of participants, and this is the answer we think that people would truly use and enjoy. Although there is a second part of the solution as well, a type of mobile solution for students to bring with them.