Stress balls have never worked for me. Maybe I’m just too blessed to be stress! Or, more realistically, a squishy ball just doesn’t cut it when dealing with the pressures of life in an expanding universe. German designer Simone Schramm has developed a new stress ball that adds a techno touch to the time-honored catharsis toy and she’s relied heavily on 3D printing to do it.
Schramm’s Stress Ball is meant to provide users with feedback related to just how stressed their feeling. But quantitative data, the designer seems to argue, only magnifies stress levels. For that reason, the Stress Ball doesn’t provide numbers, but intuitive, haptic and visual data. Users stroke and press the ball while an external sensor measures skin conductivity, in turn inflating an internal balloon which presses against the individual compression springs of the 580 tiny, 3D-printed knobs to expand in relation to the user’s stress level.
Schramm writes of her project, produced for her Interface Design master thesis at Fachhochschule Potsdam, “The length of the nobs reflects the intensity of the stress level. Through actively touching, pressing or stroking the object, the user quickly starts to sharpen his or her tactile perceptual capacity and to associate different surface conditions with his or her individual stress level. When the colored nobs expand, their movement changes the uni-colored surface into a multicolored sculpture. The effect underlines the emotional accessibility and the three-dimensionality of the product.”
Whether or not it relieves stress is hard to say, but it’s certainly a soothing looking device. It’s presence alone might just allow you to relax a bit.
