Using the body as a tool.
Deliverables:
3D Product Design, app experience
Role:
Visual Design, 3D
The Day Pen is a combination of technologies that present a unique tactile approach to a digital product in the psychotherapy world.
I began this project with the starting idea of wanting to create something within the therapy space. Upon researching further, I found numerous new apps and digital technologies that were being marketed. Many of them touched on meditation, breathing exercises and writing (in app) about your thoughts and experiences.
What I noticed a gap in, was a lack of a tactile approach to journaling your ideas in this app. This is important considering historically, there have been numerous studies done on the benefits of physical writing.
“That linkage between hand and mind is intimate,” says anthropologist David F. Armstrong. The importance of the hand-mind link is seen in developing children, for whom the ability to manipulate physical objects tracks uncannily with the acquisition of speech.
It is also evident in the clinical literature, which contains many examples of patients with brain lesions that impair their handwriting also struggling to recognize letters by sight. For people who have trouble reading, tracing the outlines of letters with their fingers often helps. ( Brandon Keim, "The Science of Handwriting", The Scientific American, 2013.)
