Problem Statement:
For the capstone project of the Product Design program at Stanford, we were asked to select a topic of interest and move through the full design thinking process–empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test–with the user group of our selection. The desired outcome was to build a product for the group that addressed needs isolated throughout the process.

Project Details:
Team: three female product designers
Timeline: two quarters (~6 months), 2016-2017

Objectives:
As three women, we noticed a relative dearth of products aimed at assisting with the emotional pain of the dark side of childbirth: infertility, miscarriage, stillborn pregnancies. There is discomfort and taboo associated with these unfortunately common occurrences, making products aimed at helping people through the experiences more rare than one might imagine.

Ultimately, our team selected miscarriage as our topic of choice, drawn in part by its occupancy of a liminal space: a miscarriage is the death of a fetus, but also of a future, one that is both viscerally familiar and seemingly impending, until it is not.

Approach/Methods:
User research: Outreach, interviews, synthesis, frameworks, concept testing
Prototyping: Ideation, physical prototyping
Print production: Adobe illustrator, print production/publishing
Marketing: Social media, Kickstarter

Outcomes:
We spoke to over 15 women across the U.S. about their experiences with miscarriage and learned that while sadness and grief are intuitively part of the experience, there are frequently well-intentioned misunderstandings that arise when people try to offer comfort, resulting in frustration or even anger that have no outlet.

To address this need, we designed Stomp Here, an interactive journal that encourages women and their partners to physically vent their anger through the cathartic destruction of a journal that includes prompts representing “silver lining sayings” i.e. something unintentionally hurtful someone has said or done. The journal became not only a way to acknowledge difficult emotions without jeopardizing relationships, but also a communication tool in order to help friends and family better understand the experience.

Our team launched Stomp Here on Kickstarter, where it was named a Kickstarter Project We Love and ultimately funded. We used a local printing press in the Bay Area to produce the final version and shipped it to backers across the country.