EPIONE
Redefining Intimacy After Trauma
CIID Thesis Project
Nov 2020 — Feb 2021 | 9 weeks | Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design
Epione, named after the Roman goddess of healing, is a toolkit designed to create safe spaces for couples to work through intimacy issues and trauma. Through breathing exercises and a trauma-informed card game, couples build trust and understanding in a healing journey designed for sexual assault survivors and their partners. The project took nine weeks to complete, during which over 20 hours of in-depth interviews and co-creation sessions were conducted with survivors, partners of survivors, and subject matter experts.
Epione received international recognition and was showcased at Milan Design Week 2023 and Dubai Design Week 2021.
Design Opportunity
One in three women has experienced sexual violence in their lifetime. Additionally, 94% of sexual assault survivors exhibit symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, such as flashbacks and dissociation. Trauma can make it difficult for survivors to feel safe and connected to their bodies, which can make intimacy a triggering and anxiety-inducing experience. Partners of survivors may also feel helpless and isolated when they learn about their loved ones' assault, and this aspect is often overlooked during the healing process.
How might we support couples who have experienced trauma in navigating intimacy and healing together?
Concept
Epione is a toolkit that supports couples who have experienced sexual assault in a trauma-informed way. It aims to redefine intimacy and create a safe space for connection during their shared journey towards healing. The toolkit includes an interactive meditative device that guides users through breathing exercises with a glowing light, as well as a card game that promotes emotional intimacy by providing prompts for communication about boundaries and desires.
Grounding Device
The interactive meditative device, shaped like a ring, is designed to help couples stay present and focused on their senses when feeling overwhelmed. It guides them to breathe together, creating a shared moment of intimacy when their heart rates synchronise, indicated by a change in the device's colour.
The ring shape of the device represents connection, while the memory foam material gives it a soft and organic feel.
Card Game
Survivors may find it tough to communicate their boundaries and desires. The card game creates a safe space for couples to engage with each other. It includes question and activity cards that help them share their boundaries and desires, thus enhancing emotional closeness.
The cards are divided into different levels of intimacy to cater to couples at various stages of their healing journey. This allows couples to choose a deck that aligns with their current emotional readiness and facilitates a gradual progression towards deeper levels of connection. Prompts and questions were designed to be sensitive to trauma with gender-neutral language. Colours were chosen carefully to avoid any connotation around heteronormativity.
The question cards empower meaningful connections between couples by covering topics around their Personal Lives, Relationships, and Intimacy. The cards encourage couples to share and listen to each other, fostering deeper understanding and connection.
The activity cards suggest different activities that couples can do to build intimacy. By sharing their boundaries and desires, couples can explore new things together. To help with this, the cards encourage couples to vote on the activities using different coloured tokens. This reveals how in sync they are by the end of the game, creating a deeper understanding of each other's needs and preferences.
Couples receive half-moon-shaped game pieces when their preferences align and angled game pieces when they differ. These pieces create a totem that reminds couples to acknowledge and respect each other's boundaries and desires. Through this process, couples can build something beautiful together, transcending their differences and strengthening their relationship.
Process
Planning & Recruitment
To prepare for this project, I enrolled in trauma-informed and academic theory training before engaging with participants. To ensure the following:
Safety: I followed the standard protocol of obtaining informed consent for data collection and took utmost care to ensure that no personally identifying information was stored or retained.
Agency: Participants were provided with interview guides prior to each session, allowing them to review the questions in advance. Furthermore, the sessions were structured to grant participants full control and autonomy.
Trust and transparency: To establish trust and maintain transparency, I shared all materials related to the research process with participants. Their input and feedback were sought to ensure that they felt comfortable with how their information would be portrayed and represented.
To gather preliminary insights, I conducted social listening activities. Additionally, I created a project site that served as an information hub and facilitated sign-ups from interested individuals. To reach more people, I collaborated with support groups and leveraged their networks to disseminate information about the project and its sign-up site.
Research
13 participants were interviewed in-depth for over 12 hours and grouped into three categories:
Primary targets: survivors, partners of survivors, and individuals who struggle with asexuality
Experts: academic experts, psychotherapists, sexual trauma experts, and a sex tech company founder
Analogous research: individuals who have gone through traumatic accidents and long recovery journeys
Although every healing journey is unique, research has proven that having a safe and relaxing space that allows for exploration is crucial for healing. During the research, many survivors and partners expressed the need for multiple pieces that address different needs during their healing journey. This inspired a concept that creates space to redefine intimacy and build connections, addressing different needs along the way.
I wish I knew about breathing exercises and grounding sooner, because now it doesn't take me an hour to calm my body down.”
Phoebe (pseudonym)
Survivor
I wish people would understand that it is also a traumatic experience for me, even though it didn't happen to me.”
Marc (pseudonym)
Partner of survivor
INSIGHTS
SYNCHRONYRhythm and synchrony help people connect
Hearing each other's heartbeat is nice and relaxing when you lie on someone's chest.”
Valerie (pseudonym)
Struggles with asexuality
REDEFINEPeople look for ways to redefine intimacy
The thing that's been most helpful is having them reframe sex as just being about making out this week, and work their way up.”
Sarah
Psychotherapist
RITUALPerforming a ritual gives people a sense of control
I still get overwhelmed. I wake up, go for a walk, and journal. All these things I'm incorporating into my life are about making space for myself.”
Ana (pseudonym)
Survivor
INCREMENTAL STEPSNormalisation helps build incremental steps
[On going to dance classes to cope with involuntary reaction to physical touch] I wasn't great at it, but it made me feel like I was working on it.”
Phoebe (pseudonym)
Survivor
EXPLORATIONPlay creates a relaxed setting for exploration
Play to me is a signpost of healing. Play is important, because when we begin to process, it gets us out of that intense focus on the pain and pleasure.”
Devi
Sexual Trauma Expert
Ideation
Grounding Device
The grounding device was created based on the concept that rhythm and synchrony can foster connections between people.
During my research, I spoke with someone who experiences asexuality and learned that she feels most intimate with her partner when she hears their heartbeat. I also talked to neuroscientists from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, who explained that synchronised breathing can affect heart rates and facilitate neural synchrony between couples. These insights inspired the development of a device that uses pulse sensors and light to encourage couples to synchronise their heart rates through breathing exercises.
Card Game
In my conversations with survivors, the topic of setting boundaries and normalising the effects of trauma kept coming up. This motivated me to develop a card game that provides a safe and open space for couples to communicate their boundaries and desires to each other.
Working with game experts, I explored various gameplay options and settled on a concept that promotes sharing and listening. The game includes a physical component that serves as a visual reminder of shared boundaries and desires.
Prototyping & Testing
Grounding Device
Conceptual Prototype
To test my idea of creating a peaceful moment by synchronizing heart rates, I found Ellen Nickles’ Heart Sync project and used it as my initial prototype. I tested it with a survivor using two pulse sensors, an Arduino, and a Processing sketch. The feedback for the prototype was positive, so I moved on to building a functional physical prototype.
Functional Prototype
I tested my functional prototype with a couple, one of whom had anxiety issues. My goal was to see if the device would help during moments of overwhelm and if people preferred solitude during those times. From the test, I learned that it's important to have an onboarding experience while pulse sensors stabilise, and that a ring-shaped design representing connection and togetherness could be effective.
Physical Prototype
In the following testing session, a survivor evaluated a higher-fidelity prototype using rings of different materials and sizes. The key findings revealed that the ring shape remained the preferred form, and a spongy material was favoured over hard plastic due to its resemblance to human skin and more organic texture.
When people suffer a trauma like that, trust is difficult. This gives us a middle ground in that process of regaining trust, or just to manage the experience that we have on regular basis.
… things like breathing, when you are angry, you don’t think about it, your brain could go really fast so things like this really helps you understand to remind yourself being present.‘
Maria (pseudonym)
Survivor
Card Game
Conceptual Prototype
I tested the first prototype of the card game with a survivor on Miro, an online collaboration tool. Although it was tough to simulate gameplay digitally, the survivor responded positively to using card prompts to talk about challenging topics. Some important things I learned were that I need to create more cards to explore different aspects of intimacy and that I should use a modular design with different categories and levels of questions.
Functional Prototype
I began by creating 270 prompts related to personal life, relationships, and intimacy. I also sorted activity ideas into three intimacy levels. To make sure the game worked well, I tested it with a volunteer using a low-fidelity prototype. The main lesson was the importance of giving players clear instructions and expectations even with minimal guidance.
Physical Prototype
A mid-fidelity prototype was created to address intimacy issues for a couple, a survivor, and a designer volunteer. The couple received cutouts of the game to play at their convenience and discovered new things about each other after six years of dating. The survivor found the questions in the game thoughtful and non-triggering during the testing session.
I have been learning the value of setting boundaries. It's a really difficult problem when you are in a relationship…
...this helps open the conversation bit by bit, and it doesn't involve the actual trauma that you went through, so it doesn’t remind you. You don't have to tell him if you don't want to, but there is a starting point.”
Maria (pseudonym)
Survivor
Impact
Epione aims to create a safe and supportive space for couples to explore intimacy and connect with each other, reducing the stigma around sexual assault. Originally designed for survivors, it's also applicable to couples experiencing anxiety or relationship issues. Read about how participating in this project helped a partner of a survivor process his own trauma here.
A localised and modified version of a card game was created for the Association Concerning Sexual Violence Against Women (ACSVAW) in Hong Kong. The game was designed to explore the meaning of consent and boundaries at a sex education fair. Recently, the project was selected to be showcased at the Milan Design Week 2023 and sparked many enlightening conversations with international visitors.
Thank you to everyone who supported this project.
This project is dedicated to anyone who has been affected by sexual assault.
A huge thank you to the CIID network:
Aakash Dewan, Nina Shenoy, Majo Tamayo, Martin Altanie, Sarah Ali, Ana Acevedo, and Alejandro Segura, Ubaldo Andrea Desiato, Martina Pagura, Simona Maschi, Alie Rose, Natalia Roberts, Ana Marcela Vega, Martin Skau, Sophia Höfling, Fahmida Azad, Simon Herzog, and Vanessa Julia Carpenter
… and everyone who came forward to share your stories with me.
