The original idea of Worry Capsule Tree comes from one of the creators Yuan’s desire to release daily stress by keeping his anxiety into a safe place. After Yuan talked to me, this idea of telling and storing worries reminded me of the time capsule, whose function is to help people store memories that are accessible a long time later. 

Both of us liked the concept of storing current anxiety and retrieve it in the future. On one hand, it helps release the stress we have now, and on the other hand, it provides us with a chance to re-visit our past selves and see how much we have overcome and grown.

Since we decided to build something that deals with emotions and memories, the questions of:
“how would the users best communicate with this capsule?” and “how do they emotionally engage with the device” become very important.

These questions triggered us to first think about the appearance of our device. Our first thought is the image of a tree. Trees have the ability to absorb substances from the environment and convert them to nutritious fruits. We think it’s a metaphor for transforming people’s anxiety to their assets in the future. Therefore, we decided to build a worry capsule tree which can respond to the users and store their worries. This has brought us to the very first stage of our design.