Dahoon Lee

Cone-centration, Please

Date

29 NOV 2024 12 DEC 2024 (2 Weeks)

Sensory

Where are you right now, really? Our bodies may be in the present, but our thoughts often drift into the past or the future. Our group proposed Cone-centration, a cone-hat-based experience designed as a psychological device that helps people return to the present through intentional sensory restriction.

Where Are You, Really?

We wanted to explore, through experience, the hypothesis that many worries come from regret about the past and anxiety about the future. What form could a psychological device take that pulls someone back from temporal wandering into “now”? Can deliberate sensory interference or limitation genuinely support present-moment focus?

Past - Present - Future

Using data physicalisation, we collected responses to the question “What are you thinking about right now?”, mapping whether each response sat in the past, present, or future, and what emotions it was connected to. We noticed a pattern where past-focused responses leaned clearly towards positive or negative, while future-focused responses spread more widely across positive, neutral, and negative.

With the hypothesis that intentional sensory stimulation or restriction could help present focus, we ran speed-dating-style comparisons of small tasks to identify the directions that had the strongest effect.

Sensory restriction can act as a trigger that interrupts mental wandering and supports immersion in the task at hand, making it a valid direction to design “restriction itself” as the device.

Designed Distraction

Use the cone hat’s narrow field of view to sort beads and complete an image. Focus only on here and now.

We designed a game structure that intentionally limits the senses in order to reduce intrusive thoughts and support attention on a present task. Visual restriction became the core mechanism, using the small opening of a cone hat as the main constraint. We provided simple sketch templates and built a task flow where participants sort beads to complete an image.

What Focus Felt Like

Participants reported that the experience genuinely helped them feel calmer and more separated from other thoughts. I would like to explore how this could be extended into different contexts and with a wider range of sensory variations.

Credits

UX Design

Dahoon Lee
Anhelina Kotik (Angelina)
Anushka Monteiro
Lissy Li
Mustafa Motiwala
Uday Goel

Mentored by

Alaistair Steele
Tonicha Child
John Fass

Project Journals

UX of the Present Week 1Where Am I, Now?
05 DEC 2024

UX of the Present Week 2Distraction to the Present
12 DEC 2024