LOUE
LOUE is a communication tool that was conceptualized and built as a part of Kintsugi Design’s Project Menopause. During Project Menopause, Kintsugi Design identified and investigated multiple areas affecting women as they transcend into their menopause. The ambition was to use technology to meaningfully empower women during menopause.
When investigating the stigma associated with menopause, we learned that many menopausal women do not feel safe or comfortable talking about menopause in their everyday environment. While many might try to design to change the women’s behavior, we aimed to instead address the environment itself. We discovered that the problem we were investigating also extended beyond menopause. The real underlying problem was about making the workplace better equipped to talk about hard topics and emotions in general.
Inspired by how bees in a beehive communicate, when worker bees carry out their work, led to the creation of LOUE - The Lamp Of Unambiguous Emotion! It communicates the emotions of the people in the workspace, helping them cooperate efficiently and in a more considerate manner.
LOUE can shine in the color and brightness of your choice. The color and brightness reflect how you feel in reference to the office's color code.
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 LOUE
The concept should be self-explanatory in the video above.
LOUE competed at the Hackaday price held by the maker community hackaday.io. It was part of the division 01 - Rethink Displays. The competitors had to document their full development process with project logs as well as thoughts on the development. To see the process behind the development of LOUE click this link and check out the entry for the competition.
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