Dutch Design Week 2017

Last week, we had an inspiring day at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. We exhibited the latest prototype of the Silence Suit in the exhibition Do (not) feed the makers and asked the visitors to participate in a virtual tour through the Meditation Lab. We wanted to ask them for some feedback about the procedure […]

Enjoying the multidisciplinary collaboration

I am really enjoying my internship at Awareness Lab. Even if I only speak Danielle regularly, and other team members from time to time, I get the impression that I can mean something to the whole. I like to hear how Danielle is reflecting on her own person every morning I visit her. And I […]

Getting deeper

We have some great news: You can participate in a visual demonstration of the Meditation Lab Experimenter Kit the 28th of October on Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. At the moment the project really satisfies me. We still get deeper into many aspects of the Silence Suit as you can read in the following. Reflecting […]

Virtual View: statistics for experiment 3

In experiment three I wanted to see if adding movement to visual content had a bigger lowering effect on heart-rate and subjective stress then just using a still. And I wanted to know if variables like heart-rate and skin conductance could be restored to or below the baseline following a stress stimulus. Sound accompanied the […]

Virtual View: experiment 3 setup

For the design of the third experiment I got advice from Petra van der Schaaf, environmental psychologist. The main research question for this experiment is: does animation have added value in the restorative effect of natural stimuli? So far I’ve tested the stimuli in sets containing 6 or 12 slides. The sound didn’t have a […]

Virtual View: animation theory

The last weeks I’ve been working on designing and researching my third experiment. The next step will be to introduce animation and to study its effects. I was curious to see if there had already been research into the effect of different types of animation on stress reduction. Rather to my surprise I couldn’t find […]

Information literacy

While designing experiment number three I bumped into the complexity of doing proper research. I realised I lacked some information literacy skills. Luckily the Open University (where I study psychology) offers free master classes. Last week one started on information literacy for researchers. This has been very helpful for me to get a grip on […]

Virtual View: results experiment 2

The analysis of the second experiment has taken a long time. At first there appeared to be no significant results on any of the variables, except on the heart-rate during the cognitive stress task. So I consulted different people with a degree and research experience and asked for help. I’ve really learned a lot from […]

Virtual View: design of experiment two

After conducting and analysing the first experiment some points of improvement emerged. The differences in heart-rate between the sets weren’t significant so we want to create more extremes in heart-rate. One group will get a heart-rate enhancing trigger and there will be a control group that won’t. There was evidence of interaction with age for […]