Heavy Mental

The Heavy Mental app gently and playfully encourages users to record their feelings and observe how their emotions change over time. It creates a space in which the user’s inner emotional world can be reflected, visualized and communicated in a novel way.

The combination of feelings recorded by the user at any given time creates a unique ‘mood shape’, a visual translation of the user’s emotional state. Each new emotion added to the mood shape influences its form, movement, color scheme and sound.

Heavy Mental is based on insights acquired through basic research on the changing aesthetics and representation of psychological distress among young people in the context of digital transformation. The research was carried out by the Department of Trends and Identity at the Zurich University of the Arts.

User experience and design

To ensure the app satisfied the expectations of its target group - young adults - we drew much of our inspiration from emerging, contemporary graphic design. While the visual design is radically simple, there are parts of the app that deliberately subvert established design maxims like ‘form follows function’ or ‘reduce to the max’.

At first glance, the menu appears to adopt a no-frills color scheme. Black - i.e. the presence or absence of all colors - is the dominant color of the UI. As the only other ‘color’ in the foreground of the UI, white ensures maximum contrast. Colored accents are deliberately omitted. When the user creates the first mood shape, all this changes.

When it comes to creating the mood shapes, the app becomes altogether more colorful, experimental and individual. This deliberate and clear separation of user interface (black and white, restrained, reduced) and content (colorful, varied and with limitless potential outputs) allows the mood shapes to occupy the central focus.

Other design elements include transparent oval bubbles that are perceptible only by a white sheen at their upper edge and which represent a deliberate break with the austere look of the ‘Futter Grotesk’ font by David Lüthi. By contrast, simple, non-geometric vector elements are used to guide the eye towards the intermittently appearing user tips, which are designed to jump out at the user and guide them through the app on a separate level.

Main feature: Mood Mixer

The Mood Mixer is where users record their emotions. The user is presented with a stationary sphere as an ‘emotion-neutral’ mood shape and can then add up to three of their current emotions. Each input exerts its own unique effects on the form and color of the mood shape as well as on the background color and soundscape.

Analytical description of the shapes enables continuous transformation from one state to the next. The topological properties of the shapes are preserved throughout and are not changed by stretching, compressing, bending, distortion or twisting.

Customized shaders ensure that the shape transitions are displayed smoothly. The equations are calculated on the GPU to preserve battery and prevent the smartphone from heating up.

Inspiration for the equations came from a variety of sources, including:

• The superformula discovered by Belgian botanist Johan Gielis in 2000, which describes objects occurring in nature (e.g. starfish, flower petals, and snowflakes).
• The formula for modeling sea shells, to which an entire branch of mathematics is devoted.
• Fresnel’s wave surface formula, which Fresnel discovered when studying the propagation of light in optical biaxial crystals.

Save and share feelings

By creating mood shapes at regular intervals over time, users generate their own individual gallery. The saved shapes can be viewed and shared at any time along with the emotions entered or the accompanying personal notes.

Guaranteed data security

The app does not require a login; all data is stored on the device. The app dispenses with tracking entirely, which guarantees that feelings and personal notes are protected and cannot be accessed by others without the user’s permission.

About Heavy Mental

Heavy Mental is the result of interdisciplinary collaboration at the interface of psychology, design, mathematics and software development. The project was initiated by the ‘Care Futures’ research division of the ‘Trends & Identity’ program at the Zurich University of the Arts in collaboration with Pro Juventute and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. The applied research was supported by Health Promotion Switzerland and the Jubilee Foundation of Swiss Mobiliar Insurance. The implementation of the prototype was made possible by the financial support of the Sanitas Foundation. Milk was responsible for the design and software development.

Credits

Our services: Concept, UX, design, iOS software development, testing
Customer: Zurich University of the Arts
Platforms: iOS