Overview
Topic: Digital Detox
Type: Service Design, Prototyping, Branding, Design Research
Team: Aman Sandhu, Bayan Al Masri, Maha Saker
My Role: Design research, Concept ideation, Prototyping, Visual design
Project Summary
“Take Me Off” is a combination of a product and service that tackles the issue of digital addiction within teenagers and young adults using a set of playing cards where the users have to complete challenges on a regular basis. The idea behind our proposed solution was not to eradicate the use of digital devices but to use its benefits to our advantage.
Problem and Research
Digital detox is all about reducing the amount of time we all spend on our devices, our screens and our gadgets. Technology has become a prominent aspect of most people’s lives, and the fact is, it’s changed lives for the better. That being said, relying and using it in excess like we do now. has birthed numerous issues.
An estimated 210 million people suffer from addiction to social media and the internet.
People with internet addiction tend to isolate themselves and spend a lot of time alone.
My team and I used Double Diamond Design Process. For the Discover stage, we extensively researched digital detox and its importance. In this stage we conducted 13 interviews & found strikingly similar answers across the board that gave us tens of insights.
We reframed our key insights as needs of the users to take us on a path for the solution, where the users are placed at the center. We were able to narrow it down to 4 concise ones, the most prominent of them being that “people need a distraction from the distraction”.
Final Concept
Named “Take Me Off”, this product ultimately asks its participants to be distracted from their digital activities for a given time using a challenge. The name Take Me Off is a play on words from the statement “Take Me On” as well as the literal meaning of ‘take me offline’ or ‘off digital use’.
The Take Me Off website would be used in parallel with the product, however, a section of it would be dedicated to forums where people using “Take Me Off” or other forms of digital detox can talk to each other and share tips or experiences. In order to spread awareness about our brand. we believe that a campaign could drive the launch. The campaign would consist of giving away a certain number of the product for free, and that includes the influencers we want trying out Take Me Off. Pop-up shops could allow people to test-out the product and be informed of how and why it works.
Reflections
We started our journey by trying to understand the main issues with the use of technology in today’s world. During our primary and secondary research, there were a number of learnings that really caught us by surprise.
We were surprised to learn how small everyone’s attention span had become. This meant that our service needed to work hand in hand with the user’s short attention span and also help the user achieve a short period of digital detox.
Our hunches about what people expect from us were correct, but, our hunches about what we expect from them were wrong. This meant that asking the user to take three hours off technology was not a viable option and we needed to demand less of our customer base.
