
HALLE
HALLE - Hourglass of Long Lasting Engagement was a concept developed during project Menopause during my internship at Kintsugi Design. Kintsugi Design identified and investigated multiple areas affecting women as they transcend into their menopause. Our ambition was to use technology to meaningfully empower women during menopause.
HALLE is a dis-connectivity device. it's purpose is to strengthen the habits of focused work of menopausal women affected by brain fog. Brain fog is one of the symptoms related to menopause. It makes one feel disorganized, confused, and unable to focus. In our current society always being connected and available is the norm. However, being connected also makes one vulnerable to distraction from what might be more important and if influenced by brain fog that effect may be worse.
HALLE is a connected hourglass - for disconnecting. When the hourglass is flipped, selected connected devices or apps go to "do not disturb-mode" for the same duration as the sand falling through the hourglass. While the sand flows, the user can focus on the task at hand without distractions.
The first month of the internship was spent on research and empathizing with the topic and the user. We read through various articles online and interviewed real women pre-, undergoing and post-menopausal to get a sense of what the area of menopause involved. This was to get an underlying foundation that could be used in the following development. One of the concepts developed following the deep dive was HALLE
The concept should be self-explanatory in the video above - Check it out and read on to find out how HALLE was created.

Inspired by reading the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. We got the idéa that we wanted to help the menopausal women experiencing brain fog by strengthening their habit of working deep. Several ideas were developed which should help women get offline to kill distractions. However, as distraction can also come from other people in the physical environment we wanted the device to be something tangible, which could be placed on a desk to clearly signal that the person should not be distracted.
The doodles above were sketched by me in Autodesk Sketchbook on my tablet, as an exercise to brainstorm multiple concepts quickly of what this device might look like.

After evaluating the multiple concepts we decided that an hourglass would work as a great online and tangible timekeeper to signal that focussed time was engaged. However, we also felt that the device should be aesthetically pleasing to be an object that could proudly be placed as and desktop device in an office space. We found that an hourglass could also be fitting here.
The sketches above were made by me to iterate effectively and think of multiple possible ways the hourglass could look, work, and be made. I find that sketching digitally combines the best of both worlds from the digital and the physical when ideating. I can quickly draw lines to show what i thick but i can also copy and paste drawings and edit them as well as share them with my team in a quick message or on our cloud.


The curvature of the hourglass should for visceral and aesthetic reasons have it's curvature shaped after the golden sopiral. Drawing digitally i could paste a photo of the golden spiral to draw my lines on top of spiral to get the perfect curvature.

I created CAD models with SolidWorks, Rendered in Keyshot, and annotated with Canva to conseptualize and communicate the idea - For conceptualization my Ideas my mantra is Don't tell it, Show it.


Vizualisations of the product in different use cases were made to show multiple considerations of the product. Here frem left to right, assembly, Product ranges and activation.





From an illustrator file, a pieces of ply wood was laser-cut and glued to hold the hourglass and protect it if dropped


Same procedure for the Activation pad



An alluminum rod was cut on a bandsaw to get a fitting length suitable for the hourglass' pillars


The knobs were cut from another aluminium rod and turned to chamfer the edges smoothly as well as make an internal thread to fit with the vertical pillars


After receiving the hourglass by HAY, I assembled the final prototype





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