Problem Solver + Designer + Team Player = Engineer
Lifelines — Designing Physical Interfaces for Emotional Regulation
At Lifelines, I worked as a product design engineer on consumer wellness devices intended to support emotional regulation, focus, and presence through everyday interaction. My role spanned user research, mechanical design, prototyping, and design-for-manufacturing, with a consistent focus on how physical form and interaction shape internal cognitive and emotional states.
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Across multiple projects, I explored how small, carefully designed physical cues –such as texture, weight, scent, sound, and interaction timing– can meaningfully influence attention, calm, and perceived control. Rather than relying on screens or explicit instruction, these products aimed to work at a more intuitive, pre-verbal level, allowing users to self-regulate through interaction with simple objects.
Dauber: Catch-and-Release Mechanism
For the Dauber tool, I designed and iterated on a compact (~4 cm) internal catch-and-release mechanism that allowed users to securely hold and release stamps or sponges with a single, deliberate action. Through multiple design iterations, I discovered that subtle changes in button placement, force required, and tactile feedback significantly affected comfort, accidental activation, and perceived reliability. The final design balanced mechanical robustness with an interaction that felt intentional and reassuring, reinforcing user confidence through touch rather than instruction.
DIY Night Lamp: Participatory Assembly as Interaction
In a separate concept project, I designed a DIY night lamp that allowed users to paint transparent tiles and assemble them into a stained-glass–like structure. When early prototypes revealed cost and usability issues, I re-architected the system using a sliding-rail structure inspired by Connect Four, enabling modular assembly without adhesives. This redesign reduced plastic use by 80%, lowered production cost, and, more importantly, shifted the lamp from a static object into an interactive, participatory experience, where users could see and feel the result of their choices.
Learnings
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These projects taught me how much influence small physical design decisions can have on behavior and emotional state. Changes in resistance, texture, light diffusion, or actuation timing consistently shaped how users approached an interaction, often before they were consciously aware of it.
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Working within tight constraints around manufacturability, cost, and reliability forced me to think carefully about how meaning and guidance could be embedded directly into form, rather than communicated through instructions or screens. I learned that users often trusted and engaged with a system not because they understood it intellectually, but because it felt intuitive, safe, and predictable in their hands.
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This experience fundamentally shaped how I think about human–system interaction: not as information transfer, but as a continuous feedback loop between sensation, perception, and action. It is the foundation from which my current interests in sensing, adaptive systems, and human-centered intelligence emerged.
