Soteria

At a glance

The work

A phone that asks, and a world where the answer appears.

The problem

Remote work cut people off from the everyday contact that carries social support, and the loneliness that followed was hard to cope with. It also blurred work and home, and social media absorbed both. People reached for it to feel less alone, but it rewards an idealised self, and comparing yourself to people who appear to be doing better is linked to shame, envy and a sense of otherness. That drives the cycle on: perceived isolation, less help-seeking, deeper isolation.

The platform people reach for to fix isolation is built in a way that deepens it.

The design question, in that order:

How can people's ability to cope with loneliness be increased by enhancing the social support around them? And how can the platform that support runs on stop producing the unrealistic comparison that currently makes loneliness worse?

The solution

The objective is to increase people's ability to cope with loneliness by enhancing the social support available to them. That support has to run somewhere people are willing to be honest, and the platforms they already use are not that place. So Soteria is also an alternative to them: one that meets the needs for companionship, intimacy, belonging and reassurance of self-worth while avoiding addictive features and drawing out authentic disclosure rather than performance.

Soteria captures people's genuine thoughts and feelings through short, randomly timed mobile prompts, then turns them into objects in a shared virtual world: a message in a bottle, a change in the weather, a flower in a garden. Anyone can visit them anonymously.

How it works

Enhancing the social support around someone

Enhancing social support improves health by meeting basic human needs for companionship, intimacy, a sense of belonging, and reassurance of one's own worth, even in otherwise stressful situations. It also increases problem-solving ability, access to new contacts and information, and perceived control over a situation, all of which buffer against stress (Glanz et al., 2008; Thoits, 1995).

An alternative worth being honest on

Social media platforms can reduce wellbeing in two ways at once: through widespread hostility and insults (Moor et al., 2010), and through the unrealistic social comparison that selective self-presentation produces. An alternative has to avoid both while still meeting the same human needs the first group describes.

Snapshots of Daily Life

The process

1. Understanding the user. Team brainstorming on learning problems in the metaverse; interviews with remote workers about needs, frustrations, and environments; personas and empathy maps built from those interviews.

   Brainstorming Session

   User Interview

   

   User Persona

   Empathy Map

2. Defining the problem. A literature review found remote-work stress compounded by isolation, workplace strain, and heavier social media reliance, which offers connection but carries misinformation and addiction risks (Eden, 2020; Cato et al., 2021; Dhir et al., 2021), and framed the whole as a web of direct and indirect stressors including fear of illness and economic uncertainty (Eden, 2020; Lundahl, 2020).

   A competitor analysis covered twelve products: blocking, which requires self-discipline and ignores root causes (Freedom, and Offtime through it); AR, biofeedback and clinical games for regulation and attention, none of them tied to social media use (Inner Garden, PlayMancer, Journey to the Wild Divine, Mindlight, EndeavorRX, SmartCAT); gamification, dependent on sustained engagement (Forest, SuperBetter); and online communities and courses, the closest analogues to Soteria (Kooth, Togetherall, Performance Learning), where Kooth's own evidence was that forums add lower-level support rather than replacing a counsellor. A theoretical framework then modelled loneliness as a downward spiral: psychological factors drive maladaptive coping, coping shapes the environment, environment reinforces the beliefs.

   Competitor Review

3. Ideating. Three directions were explored and rejected before Soteria: Neopet (virtual pets mirroring emotional states), Water Cooler (a virtual space for work stress), and Planting Flags (marking emotional states in daily life for later reflection).

   The same six features group a second way. This diagram sorts them by the mechanism each one serves rather than by the problem it solves, which is why it lists eight: the communal space appears twice, once for hope-sharing and once for problem-solving, and the snapshot appears twice, once for the capture and once for the anonymity.

   Design Solution

4. Prototyping and testing. Sketches and functional descriptions first. Several rounds of internal testing, then a round with peers and faculty mentors, then implementation of their feedback. The prototype was built as an interactive Figma phone demo plus an interactive VR demo in Tilt Brush and Unity 3D.

   VR Prototype

   Mobile Prototype in Figma

Outcome

I was then invited into the DREAMS Project, Teachers College's research group for the Design and Research of Educational Applications of the Metaverse for Social impact. I led a small team there, creating further prototypes for wellbeing.

What I'd do differently

Soteria's design ran in a straight line. The Innovation Award schedule took us through Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test once each, and the prototype never went back to the six remote workers we had interviewed.

The lesson I carry is to work in loops. Several rough versions, each tested with the people it is for, teach more than one polished build, and what testing turns up should steer the research rather than follow it. That is why I work in an Agile way now.