As a response to the brief, I decided to do my final major project around the topic ‘Hikikomori’. I decide to choose this topic because I like Japanese culture and also because my best friend was an hikikomori once and I did not know how to help her. Now I would love to help more people like her.
Hikikomori are people who shut themselves in from society for a minimum period of six months to reach even decades, and without stepping out from their house and having any communication with friends or even family members.
Some research suggested that in order to help these people going out of their house, it’s important to re-establish their communication within their family system. The challenge of this brief was to create a design that could improve the communication between young hikikomori people and their family. My final solution to this challenge was the development of an app called ‘Connect ‘Up’ that could potentially help young hikikomori to reconnect with family and friends through a series of different activities all based on social interactions. The app could also be used by family members or friends that are looking to support an hikikomori person.
The app indeed, has 2 different accounts, one for the hikikomori person (based on activities and social interactions) and the other one for family members or friends that want to support the hikikomori person (based on clinical advises).
For my final design I created the development of the app on Figma, a promo video of the app with all of its features, a website design and different posters and posts to display outdoors, on google or on social media.
