Shadoji - CHI 2019 Design Competition
An original and playful solution combining hardware and a mobile app to reduce body shaming
Project Overview
Growing up as a Chinese girl, I’ve gone through much pressure due to my chubby body shape since the beauty standard in China regards girls with slim body shape more beautiful and appealing. This project's motivation is to design for people who are insecure about their body shapes to ease their body shape anxieties by providing a new angle to view it.
Teamed up with Emmie Wang, Xizi Wang, Xuan Jin, and Peipei Nie, we entered into the finalist round CHI Student Design Competition (10% selection rate), and demoed our project at CHI 2019 Conference in Glasgow, UK.
Competition Result:
Final round (top12 team)
Project Type:
Interactive installation
Mobile app design
Duration:
Sep 2018 - Jan 2019​
Deliverables:
Video prototype
High-fi app screens
My role:
Literature Review
User interview
Brainstorming
High-fi prototype
Timeline planning
and tracking
User Research
- What is the root of negative body image?
Literature Review
The first question we asked in this project is what causes of people's negative perceptions of their body image. Through the literature review, we understood the factors, specifically the cultural and societal factors.
After reading books recommended by our professor, History of Beauty and On Ugliness, we were very attracted by the notion that there are no identical beauty standards when you put beauty in the lens of history, time and space.
HISTORY OF BEAUTY
ON UGLINESS
"Beauty is not an absolute truth.
It evolves and varies from region to region. It's influenced by race, ethnicity, artistic movement, and the state of the country."
Following the literature review, we put forward the assumption that people's self-image and the individual beauty standard are influenced by the societal beauty standard, however, the awareness that there doesn't exist an identical beauty standard is not accessible yet.
User Interviews
To validate the assumption, we conducted 6 racially diverse user interviews among people who have a certain degree of body shape anxiety. The insights obtained cohere with our assumption.
1. The societal beauty standard exists.
Interviewees admitted that their personal beauty standard is influenced or framed by the media, celebrities, and their families.
2. The beauty standard is relatively identical though it should not be.
At any given time or a region, the influential beauty standard there is relatively identical.
3. Internal perceptions drive changes.
When people share their concerns with family and friends, the feedback they received cannot really ease their anxieties.
Synthesis & Ideation Sketches
Rescoped problem:
How to help people break the identical beauty standard?
Through research, we realized the relationship between each individual's beauty standard and the society's beauty standard, as well as the importance of the internal drive viewing beauty standard in a different way.
To tackle the rescoped problem, we started with brainstorming wild ideas and set up the design criteria to converge ideas.
8 SOLUTIONS VOTED FROM 20+ IDEAS
DESIGN CRITERIA
Design Solution - Shadoji was born!
Our solution is a combination of hardware that captures participants' body shapes from the angle of the top and a mobile app that enables participants to edit their body shapes. The generated body shape is called "Shadoji"(Shadow + emoji).
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The goal is to promote a new angle(from the top) to view body shapes instead of the traditional angle of viewing people from the front to challenge the identical beauty standard. During the process of generating shadojis, participants can have fun by doing any postures. After that, they can transfer to their mobile apps to decorate their shadojis and explore shadojis all over the world.
Hardware installation that captures shadoji
Shadoji App that allows more interactions
How Shadoji works
Hi-fi mockup
Evaluations
When we tested our concept and prototype in front of interested participants, we got positive feedback and met our design goals, especially the societal impacts of challenging the beauty standard and promoting body shape diversity.
Participants Feedback
“I think this is a very interesting idea! I thought it’s a little absurd at the beginning, but if you keep thinking about it, the whole beauty standard thing is absurd as well, so it makes sense to me.”
“I think this project is super fun and I really wanna try it out! I think it expresses the idea that beauty should be in diverse forms and it provides me a new perspective to rethink beauty.”
CHI Committee Comments
“This submission describes a system for thinking about body shapes from a different perspective as a way of addressing concerns about self-image and mental health. This is a good topic, I thought that the design was very original, interesting and playful.”
“This submission proposes a new method which can bring people a new perspective on their body shapes and reduce their body shaming by capturing their body from a different angle. The concept of this submission is awesome, interesting, and seems novel.”
Love team brainstorming!