Iron Performance App
Aimed at promoting overall wellbeing in the military through performance optimisation | a social impact design project
This project started as a Mental Fitness Project which was aimed at helping Australian soldiers be as mentally fit as they are physically fit. The project outcome was the Iron App, a gamified health app which explores the use of Human Performance Optimisation as a vehicle to nurture a positive change in culture around mental health and well-being in the military, by leveraging the value soldiers assign to physical health and functional capability. Through this project’s Iron App concept, soldiers will have access to resources for both physical and mental health practices in one platform – helping them to set goals, be rewarded, and track their progress to sharpen their performance – all the while changing attitudes towards mental health and well-being.
Design Process
The model of research that best describes my method is design thinking, informed by principles of social implication design and design for well-being where I set out to explore the problem of mental ill-health in the military, the social phenomena and behaviours that contribute to that problem, and how I could design positive practices that change these behaviours.
The design proposition became: to nurture a change in culture through:
validating and legitimising mental health and wellbeing practices
approaching health holistically by aligning it with performance optimisation
appealing to the soldier identity and their motivations
The design development intersected three pathways: (1) positive psychoogy and wellbeing practices, (2) gamification of health by building users’ intrinsic motivation, and (3) building self-awareness through users’ quantified self.
