Flourish is a design intervention for couples in conflict situations. It consists of an intimate booklet containing pockets with sheets of seeded paper and postcards for saying sorry or expressing love. Besides this, it comes with a pen with lavender scented ink. The scented ink nicely connects two parts of the interaction it provides; It soothes the writer when expressing his/her feelings about the conflict, and it adds to the gesture of giving a loveletter. Writing about the conflict is done on seeded paper which is planted in the pot provided. By doing so, one’s feelings symbolically grow into flowers. This enables a romantic partner to make a loving gesture.

1. The conflict escalates.

2. A partner writes about the disagreement on seeded paper with soothing lavender scented ink.

3. The seeded paper is planted.

4. Flowers have grown; it's time to write a card.

5. The flowers & card are given.

6. The card is read & smelled.

7. The heart-warming gesture is well-received!

To familiarize myself with couples in a conflict situation I read books and reached out to relationship therapists. Moreover, I did some thorough contextmapping by means of sensitizing booklets and follow-up interviews with couples and people in a relationship.

This helped me to engage myself with the topic, set the context, empathize with the user, and inspire my design process.

Once the context became clear and design directions revealed themselves, I started using my ideas as research tools; by making quick and rough prototypes and testing them in real life I managed to validate my ideas and filter out the bad ones early on in the process.

By using my ideas as research tools I went through many iterative cycles of user testing and redesign. This enabled me to design a meaningful and validated interaction in the form of Flourish, as shown on the top page.