The Problem Space
What is loneliness? Is it isolation, feeling, disconnection, void, or shame? Loneliness is definitely in the spotlight. In the media, it is called an epidemic and sometimes insinuated to as a disease. However, it is still a taboo topic for a lot of people. This duality and controversy triggered my curiosity about this topic. During my investigation, I discovered another element of loneliness. Loneliness is also a disconnection from self. In our hyper-connected world, we often suffer from the inability to have time to ourselves. We spend so much time being social and “normal”, we rarely remember to carve out spaces for solitary contemplation.

The Concept
Honne is a tangible manifestation of meaningful moments being alone. Honne captures and saves precious experiences of solitude, and allows people to get back to those moments. Details of those moments are captured by the Honne app to create personalized artefacts that represent the person’s state of mind. It enhances people to connect with their inner self when they are feeling overwhelmed and when they need to take a break from the world and reboot. The Honne objects are portable and easy to use. Just touching the Honne object triggers a sound and immerses the person into their solitude experience.

How It Works
There are two parts of the service. The first part is capturing experiences of solitude and the second one is coming back to those experiences.

It is important to eliminate friction for both parts as the service should not be intrusive. Honne app captures experiences of solitude by a simple tap that allows the system to collect data about a location, weather, date, time zone, motion, heart and breathing rates. This data is mapped by the system to create a journal entry for each solitary moment. In that way, a person can track frequencies of having Me Time and special places.

Each journal entry can be converted into a physical artefact that represents a certain meaningful solitary experience. Algorithms use collected data to craft highly customized Honne object. The form of an object and the sound are unique and tailored specifically to a person.

Process
The research phase included exploring three dimensions of connection (connection between a person and people, a person and self, and a person and things) and investigating topic from five lenses (evolution, neuroscience, phycology, people’s experience and society perception). I interviewed psychologists, anthropologist, designers and millennials with different backgrounds to get insights.
I facilitated co-creation sessions and tests of the concepts with different prototypes and iterated them further to hone the final concept. As the service is highly personalized, the app and the artefacts were designed specifically for two people who shared their experience of solitary moments, participated in co-creation sessions and tested prototypes.

 
Impact
We avoid talking about mental health. Being alone or being lonely is stigmatized by society all around the world. One of the goals of this project was to show that solitude is a modern need and normal behaviour. User tests showed that people are eager to use Honne not only privately but also in work and public spaces to share experience and stories behind those objects.

 
For more documentation of Honne visit rinashumylo.com