Grace:
How social inclusion
empowers women in
exercising
This project was presented at
Dutch Design Week 2018
displayed at
Dutch Design Week 2019
featured in
Running Magazine 2019 →
Finding new ways to motivate people to pursue healthy mindsets and lifestyles is an ongoing challenge for society. Feelings of discouragement and demotivation is a big pitfall where it is easy to cancel or postpone plans.
Tomorrow is another day,
right?
Close emphasis on emotion and experience
Strategy & Innovation
Cultivating community
project
objective
In this project the key aims to address the key challenge how to stimulate female runners throughout the day to eventually lower the threshold to start and continue their exercise journey by designing a wearable for everyday life.
design
approach
From initial interviews to final prototype testing, integrating emotional and experiential needs of the target group was essential to be able to keep in touch with what people would actually need and use in daily life than just design something that is functional. Interviews, survey’s and customer journey mapping were used, trying to find out underlying motivational factors. The key insight was how having people around you changed the perspective if you could push yourself to follow up on exercising.
Since there is an abundance of existing fitness trackers on the market, desk research in benchmarking, upcoming market trends and gaps were done to understand user behaviour and speculate potential needs. This resulted in constant prototyping different feels and materials, leading to the choice to design for jewellery than a sports tracker. Diverse materials and electronic components were considered before landing on the use of moiré effect visualisations in E-paper.
Over time it became apparent that the current fitness market is focuses heavily on competition, using scoreboards, goal setting and individual achievements as the driving factor to better oneself. In interviews it was discovered that women were mostly used to only these methods which resulted in trying out an opposite method; engaging women to focus on the journey taken together and not the end goal. 4 Test groups were made each with a group of 3 women to try out the concept over a period of 2 weeks.
Key findings
& outcome
Define Define Define
Solving a mental block is in a wide scope or endless possibilities. At the start, reiterations in different directions kept being made on repeat, looking for thé perfect solution. But what made this project succeed was not finding one concrete solution to all problems, but the process of constantly defining to a more specific range and ultimately sticking to that solution. Just the process of sticking to the made choice, revealed the possibilities and potentials to chase after.
Although project Grace has some imperfections, the concept of social cohesion and a wearable supportive environment showed potential for future exploration and research into opting for less conventional motivation methods. These methods proved to have made a positive change in the behaviour and mindset of the 10 participants to stimulate them for a motivated journey.
The final design Grace is about celebrating collective achievements and fostering a supportive environment for active lifestyles, pushing the boundaries of motivational tools for female runners.
Through Grace which functions as a wearable bracelet, users can see whether friends plan to go exercise in a day, and if they actually went. The same information is shared about themselves. This commitment-based way of motivating is closely intertwined with an increased feeling of group coherence. The awareness of sharing goals and accomplishing them together is amplified by functions to cheer for your friends, stimulating them to get active, or celebrating with them for following up on their exercise plans.