RelaxLab

‘Please help us design and make physical interventions to help our students and employees prevent getting problems caused by stress and high workloads?’, a friend at Amsterdam School of Applied Sciences (HvA) asked us.

Stress related problems on the workfloor are rising. HvA recently investigated that about 75% of their employees and students suffer from high workloads. And the number is increasing. Not only at schools, but also at other companies and organizations worldwide. By 2030, nearly 25% of the work population won’t be able to work fulltime anymore, or not anymore at all.

Because of stress. (article)

In order to investigate what is actually going on within the HvA organization and among its people, and how physical interventions could help, the Relax.Lab is developed and made. It acts as an ‘active and alive’ platform for information and discussion. It’s a place to meet eachother and to meet us. And it’s even fine to just relax, which a lot of people do. In the meanwhile, it acted as a perfect playground for us to test some setups, materials, and design details.

Insights and quotes of people were presented back to visitors via tiles on the wall. This way people got connected and felt they were ‘finally heard and understood’. - ‘Wow, I am not alone’, and ‘Finally I’m understood’.

An intangible problem becomes tangible, and suddenly is something to relate to, in your own way. Quotes and insights of others from within your own context were a perfect stimulus for more in-depth conversations, and they even started the first personal and positive transformations to happen.

As a conclusion of the Design Research phase we proposed several options for physical interventions and currently we are developing some of them for further testing.

Client: Hogeschool van Amsterdam / Amsterdam School of Applied Sciences, faculty of Digital Media & Creative Industry.

Photography: Cees Hin