Studio Bruin

Industrial Design Studio & Photographer

Verso

To find a balance between work and private life

VERSO is a device that is ghosting your past actions. This sounds a bit creepy, but it is actually very useful. You use VERSO as a physical switch between work and relaxation by turning it. The tilt will be registered in a time-stamp which will be collected. A week later, for example, VERSO displays this data to you and invites you to keep that same pattern or to reflect on your previous behavior. Over time, VERSO shows the average of the switches. This way you can see your routines better.

Due to the moment of reflection and invitation to stop or start working, but also through the physical switch we assume that you will get a better work-relax balance in this ‘always-on’ culture.

We deployed the first iteration of VERSO at three different homes for two weeks. This deployment gave very interesting insights! We already have a lot of points of improvement if we had the possibility to work longer on this project.

What you see on the pictures is VERSO made from warm and soft materials, to give it a home feeling. The top part has light in it now. This light will switch to the other side when it is time to switch states. If you do not comply with that change, VERSO starts to wiggle a bit as an invitation to switch states. This is an invite, and not an alarm. Though it might be a trigger to stop.

Details

Activity Project – M1.1 design project

Year 2020

Duration 18 weeks

Prototype An interactive show model

Video Concept explanation

This project was a key point in my studies and kicked off my master very well. With pride I can tell you that I concluded this project with Excellence. As a group (I did this project together with Maud Oomen and Rick van Schie) we helped each other to learn new and elevate our skills. My lead was in the creativity & aesthetics part together with the business proposals made for Verso. Rick enabled me to learn about technology and realization and Maud was in the lead for the user and society part.

For me, Verso opened my perspective on designing for behavior change. I always thought that you needed to have a focus on that to be able to make sure it happened. Yet, this project had no direct focus on behavior change, and still this became a spill-over effect. This way of integrating behavior change is definitely something I take with me in my future as a designer. After this project I decided to put my design specialism focus on User & Society in combination with Creativity & Aesthetics.