How can we encourage habitual meditation practice across a diverse range of people?

 

In a day and age of technology designed to make users feel disembodied and not connected to themselves or others, our team of design engineering master’s students at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) consisting of myself, Kayla Blalack, Elmer Handojo and Zhiyu Zhang, are learning about how we can make mindfulness a serious consideration when creating products or systems for different demographics in our future careers.

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Based on secondary and primary research, meditation and mindfulness can help people practice being present and not letting their life be dictated by unhelpful thoughts and reactivity.  Research shows casual associations between mindfulness and health outcomes (Loucks, et al., 2015) (such as cognition, depression, anxiety, obesity, hypertension, pain and opioid addiction) as well as positive societal impacts (Engert, et al., 2023).  Based on primary research from observing group meditations, five in depth interviews with experienced meditators, and nine feature surveys by individuals with varying levels of meditation experience, some of the most common difficulties faced when establishing a meditation practice include struggling with the wandering mind, making meditation a continuous habit and physical back/psoas pain.

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Research gaps exist in meditation seating human factors, as traditional cushions evaluated in one study (Kageyu et al., 2012) are not ideal dimensions for all body types, making mindfulness practices less accessible for certain populations.  In general, the majority of formal research on mindfulness impacts has focused on the larger White community.  In America, for example though, many health disparities in minority communities are related to stress and therefore, mindfulness practices could provide significant benefits to those populations (Proulx et al., 2017).  One of the people I interviewed for this project is an African American incarcerated man at a prison for disabled inmates - meditating for the past nine years helped him completely change his health and life: notably, he has regained his sight after years of his brain tumor impinging on his optic functionality. 

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Primary research affinity mapped from interviews and analyzed from “buy-a-feature” data shows that effective posture aids as well as customizable guidance and environments can help people start or maintain their seated meditation practice.  These include knee, hip and back support seating features, options for in person or digital guidance recordings (with further options for religious/spiritual connections as desired), calming scents and lighting, as well as a variety of sound accompaniments.  The data collected during this project would be helpful in designing products or systems that encourage people to adopt habitual meditation practices, but other design considerations are likely to arise as more diverse populations are reached.