SeriniLily

Students: Tijne Kieft, Imke Derks, Anish Nellore, Susan Oude Vrielink, Megan van Gerwen

Partner: Workplace Vitality Hub

Coach: Bernard Grundlehner

SeriniLily

High stress levels are becoming increasingly common in workplaces. Besides the beneficial effects of stress, too much stress can negatively impact mental health, physical health, and productivity. With SereniLily we aim to make people aware of their and their colleagues’ stress levels in workplaces.

A pond filled with water lilies represents a workplace, in which every lily represents a coworker anonymously. Stress levels are visualized by lilies opening and closing. A lily opens and lights up, which means that this coworker has high stress levels. A lily closing means that the stress levels of this coworker are decreasing. 

From a survey we concluded that people already know how to manage stress when they are aware of it. Therefore, we focussed on creating awareness of collective stress using visualization, so that coworkers are stimulated to help each other reduce stress with the methods they already know.

Design process:

We did a pressure cooker for our first ideation and created our first low-fidelity prototype. With the theme of collective stress in workplaces in mind, we created a water lily that opens and closes depending on a person's stress levels.

Initially, we wanted the lily to close when someone is stressed because it looks more stressful. We reflected on our first iteration and noticed that it would be biologically more correct for the lily to open when someone is stressed for a calming effect, and close when stress levels are low. We wanted to use the lily to both relieve stress and create awareness of stress levels. Some ideas we had were lighting up the petals and aromatherapy. Every desk would have a small waterlily and there would be one large lily that represented the average stress levels in the workplace.

With the feedback we received at the midterm Demo Day, we started a new iteration. We used a survey to gain a deeper understanding of how people deal with stress in workplaces and what tools are already available. We decided that we wanted to focus on just creating awareness of stress and not stress relief since the survey showed that people already know how they can best deal with their stress. The individual lilies on each desk were therefore no longer necessary and we decided that we wanted to make it more anonymous to guarantee privacy. That is why we created a pond in which each lily represents one coworker.

We created a pond using resin to create a more water-like look. We wanted the petals to have a more calming look and less harsh edges. That is why we did some material iteration and decided to model petals and print them. We used optic fiber to replicate the stamen of a flower. The optic fiber is used to reflect the blue light emitted by an RGB ring light. We used very thin wires in combination with a servo to open and close the lilies.