Bloom

How it began 🎬

BLOOM is a project addressing the issue of anxiety, especially Generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). This project was part of the RMIT Flexible Fabrication Studio where industrial design students collaborated with textile design students. Each individual brought their expertise and skills to merge industrial design with textile to solve a design challenge. Our group (JLZ Team) chose to tackle anxiety.

The design process ⏳

Discover and Define 💡

Why anxiety?

According to statistics from, anxiety is the most common mental health condition in Australia. On average, 1 in 4 people (1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men) will experience anxiety in their life. Furthermore, women aged 15-24 years reported having an anxiety-related condition at twice the rate of men of the same age (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2015 ). One of the methods of tackling anxiety is self-care. The aim of self-care is to have good physical and mental health, to reduce stress, to be emotionally stable and to have good relationships and balance in life. Through self-care, our group aims to empower the user at the same time. Hence, our group’s redefined design challenge is:

“How might we encourage self-care at home in order to reduce anxiety in young female adults?”

Develop and Testing 🛠️

BLOOM is designed to help relieve user’s symptoms of common stresses or feelings of anxiousness, or whenever anxiety may be increasing. BLOOM consists of three objects:

• The Textural Wrap
• The Aroma Pouches
• The Relaxation Spot

Each object offers different ways of relieving anxiety by stimulating various senses.

As part of the testing methods, secondary research around sensory design and wellbeing were carried out to support the outcome. Moreover, exploration of different materials and fabrication techniques were carried out by the team.

Ideation: Sketches ✏️

Making Process 🔨

The Outcome 📸

The Textural wrap

The textural wrap is a long scarf that can be wrapped around the neck to provide warmth and comfort. The textural wrap provides a playful distraction/interaction, calming colours for positive feelings, textures to provide comfort, product to provide warmth and be functional and has an integrated vibration system to mimic a soothing heartbeat feeling.

Aroma Pouches

The Aroma pouches is a set consisting of a pouch with Velcro closure holding 3 smaller pouches of scented lavender/rice to create an eye pillow/heat-pack. Each smaller pouch can be used separately on the go or integrated into the scarf. Comes with three bottles containing different scent for customisation. The Aroma Pouches provide a sense of smell, heat (microwave safe for 10-15s), comfort and calmness, therapeutic qualities, to be held, portable, targeting areas of the body.

The Relaxation Spot

The Relaxation Spot is made of a centre rope light mat and a separate attachment mat that is semi-circle to provide more comfort and an extractable table to allow the user provide to put their personal devices such as laptop, tablet or other objects that help them to relax.

We aimed to design the Relaxation spot to be visually appealing and sense of calm by the light, also a sense of touch with soft and hard materials, provide a spot for rest/relaxation, functional for work/leisure

Personal learnings 🌱

The FlexFab studio was a great opportunity to collaborate with other people from a different discipline. It was also interesting to discover more about the soft material and fabrication process. I had a lot of “first time” such as working with leather, EVA foam, knitting, and crochet. I learned a lot during this semester and saw how textile people work differently. I was impressed by the number of material explorations that were being done and developed a deeper appreciation for treatment, the process of materials.

Furthermore, as a group, we were able to achieve what we aimed for despite the last-minute changes to refine our concepts. It was very important to have good communication, commitment and accountability as everyone was depending on others to contribute to the whole project. We focused on our strengths and interests when distributing the workload among us. It was an experience of working as a professional designer will be where working with others is inevitable to achieve creativity and innovation.

As an aspiring service, strategy designer and design consultant, I know that I need not only the technical but also the soft skills when collaborating with other people.