After the first phase of exploration and discussion through brainstorming and literature research, we found that people are experiencing loneliness and disconnection from society, and the situation has a great impact on the mental health of workers.Therefore, we decided to focus on employees’ mental health in addition to physical health.
From the aforementioned steps, we scoped the design question to: “How might we encourage employees to connect with each other while working from home?”. Our goal is to improve the social connectedness between colleagues and at the same time provide employees with high quality and active breaks while working remotely. This will help the employees to improve their mental and physical health. We held interviews with our target users to validate the need for more social interaction in the remote working context. We also found that we should minimize screen exhaustion. The insights from the interviews were used to develop the concept further. The decision was made to move to a physical product, to prevent screen exhaustion and ensure that the user is aware of the product. This concept is the CoffeeMate.
For the final design, a.s.r. Vitality collaborated with Signify. The Coffee Mate is a small device that can be placed in the kitchen.During your break, you can use the CoffeeMate to have calls with your co-workers in allow threshold way and at the same time receive rewards for this.
For future work, we will be focusing on the ethical implications and the business model of the Coffee Mate. The collaboration with Signify is the first step of finding a production partner to create a quality break experience.We are hoping to develop the concept further to align with a.s.r. Vitality’s vision.
Process of making
Coffee Mate is designed to help employees take a high quality break with their colleagues when working remotely. It is a small device that is placed in your kitchen, which encourages you to keep an active posture during your break and stay away from your work-setting with screens. The Coffee Mate consists of a small screen and a small dent for the Hue Go Vital. The Hue Go Vital has a slightly changed design, but the interaction with it in the Coffee Mate works the same. Coffee Mate provides employees with various conversation channels during their break, visible on a display. You have the choice to start a conversation with any group of colleagues you want, or join a conversation based on a topic. When you choose to start a call with colleagues, you can select one or more colleagues to join a conversation with you. They will be dragged into the invitation circle and will receive an invitation when you select ‘invite’. You can leave the conversation whenever you want by selecting ‘leave’. If you choose to join a conversation based on a topic, you get to choose from various topics (politics, news, music, nature). By swiping over the topics, you can see which colleagues are present in that conversation. You can select the conversation you want to join and leave the conversation by selecting ‘leave’ again.
Learning from activities
The team applied the theory of the business, user and ethics perspectives throughout the process of creating the Coffee Mate. We started with a broad brainstorm, which ensured a holistic perspective on the problem. Through validating our concept in between development, for example through doing user interviews, we got valuable insights from the user context. From this, we learned how to take on an entrepreneurial mindset.
