This project explores how daily bus commuting, often seen as wasted time, can be transformed into meaningful and enjoyable experiences, while encouraging passengers to value themselves during their journeys. Through research and engagement, I identified a common need among different commuters: to reduce stress and feel joyful during commuting. By focusing on passengers’ behaviors on the bus, I concentrated on lightweight, non-intrusive micro-interventions to enhance their travel experience.

Re:ride consists of two key elements: a set of window stickers and an online app. The stickers integrate local cultural elements, encouraging joyful interaction with the cityscape and fostering presence in the moment, and the audio within the app combines music with three guiding questions to prompt mindful reflection, helping passengers relieve stress and restore energy. Meanwhile, the app collects participants’ responses as behavioral data, feeding them back to bus companies to inform service improvements and ultimately encouraging more people to choose buses, contributing to sustainable urban development.

BRAINMATE Intelligent Chessboard enhances elderly cognitive health using perceptual training, adaptive algorithms, and remote collaboration. It offers an interactive, user-friendly chess experience to boost social participation. Emotional design elements encourage continuous use through performance rankings and fun penalties. Personalised algorithms provide engaging cognitive exercises, targeting visuospatial processing, attention capacity, and short-term memory, fostering cognitive improvement and healthy ageing.

Our contextual partner for this project is 3D Drumchapel, a local community organisation in Glasgow dedicated to addressing family issues in the Drumchapel area. Starting from the key question, how to attract families who are reluctant to actively seek help to participate in 3D Drumchapel’s services, we developed strategies that move from lowering entry barriers to building a sense of security. The ultimate goal is to create a community network where all members can participate, contribute, and collectively build a culture of mutual support.