Use Your Mouth is a multi-player 'disk' game to encourage difficult conversations about sex with friends, family and strangers to increase sexual competency.
My Role
The Team
Project Duration
Collaboration
Prototype Lead
Ideation, probe, 3D modeling and concept development for physical prototype, technology integration, compositing for vision video
Khushi Bhatt, Pranshu Agarwal, Arjun Gupta, Lara Federspiel, Seth Stromberger
January 2022 - March 2022
10 weeks
Immersive Reality | User Experience Design
Creative Technology
User Experience
Human Factors
Sexual Competence
Awards & Recognitions
Indigo Award 2023 recipient for 20 categories in the domains of Mobile Technology innovation and Interaction Design
Honorable Mention from IDA for Design for Society and Social Impact
The Problem
Due to negative conversations and a lack of education about sex and pleasure, people don't have space to embody, explore, and learn about their sexuality and pleasure without fear of judgment or shame. People desperately want to talk about this topic but don’t know how to express themselves, leading to frustration and feelings of self hatred.
The Solution
Use Your Mouth is a game that aims to start healthy and fun conversations about sex with the hopes of normalizing this taboo topic. UYM brings awareness and battles misconceptions seeded by sex-negativity by encouraging hilarious conversations with friends, family, and even strangers!
Understanding Sexual Competency
We are interested in exploring the topic of sexual competency. Sexual competency is understanding all things sex, from anatomy to self-pleasure and consent. Competency touches upon your understanding of the topic, as well as the ability to listen, learn, and teach others without spreading misconceptions.
Runs the game with AV functionalities. Displays the prompts for conversation as well as acts as a fact checker for information.The touchpad senses the heart rate, body temperature and pressure of each player to determine their emotions of excitement or nervousness and transforms this information into visual stimuli in the form of a colorful glowing halo. The display shows game insights after the game has ended to reflect on the conversation. The audio input listens to the conversation for fact-checking purposes as well as generating the art by catching keywords.
Use Your Mouth combines a mobile app and a physical disk. The disk is the game board that displays conversation-starting prompts, It offers audio-visual and tactile functions that sense haptic input from players regarding heart rate, body temperature, and pressure, creating a visual halo of the players' emotions directly on the disk. Use Your Mouth picks up on tone and keywords in the player's conversation during the game to develop generative AI-based art unique to these conversations. The disk’s audio-visual function also offers fact-checking when misconceptions are brought into conversation
Supports the disk by setting up the game play. Choose your number of players and topics in your disk and get started. Players can watch their art generated on their phone during the game as well as change categories and add anonymous questions.
Mobile App
The Disk
Stakeholder Map
After we defined our HMWs, we brainstormed ideas for hours to solve this immense problem.
It was essential to understand what actors are involved around sex education of our target audience and develop a stakeholder map based on our primary and secondary research to measure their Involvement and their influence to understand the ecosystem around our user fundamentally.
We found that people who are most likely to have significant influence and be most involved are Parents, Close friends, Partners, therapists, and school teachers to some extent.
Key realization
We realized that nothing in the market targeted sex-positivity, competence, and open conversation. The space we wanted to look into was unexplored, and it dawned on us that we needed to find out what people's emotions and mindsets were around sex to understand their needs to create something truly impactful and meaningful.
People want to talk about sex!
Through our initial research, we were told repeatedly that people wanted to talk about sex. But did they really? We wanted to put this to the test. We wanted to learn how inclined people were to talk with real people about sex and how they reacted to different conversations around the topic
Cultural Probe
We set up a table in two public spaces and invited strangers to play a card game with us. We developed this card game inspired by We're Not Really Strangers and made conversation-starting prompts about SEX! We made 5 variations of the same questions using different tonal languages.
What we wanted to test:
Whether people were able to reach the level of vulnerability to talk about sex.
Whether people respond to questions differently with different tonal languages.
If prolonged exposure to the topic of sex made them more comfortable with it.
This was a HUGE turning point for us!
People are more likely to approach us in groups and made us realize that this is NOT a solo game.
Prolonged exposure automatically seemed to normalize the topic, So even though there is some initial hesitance, talking and hearing about it more compels people to open up and became more comfortable talking about sex in public after hearing us talking about it, using sensitive words.
Humor and inviting tonal language helped people ease out of the tensions surrounding uncomfortable or sensitive questions. They loved reading the 'we statements' in the prompts.
Most of all, every person who talked to us said they wanted to talk about sex more! They wished they could continue these conversations.
Key Takeaways
Use Your Mouth has an emotion tracking strip that visualizes when someone is nervous, excited and everything in between. The touchpad holds an emotion tracking strip that senses heart rate, touch pressure, and body temp to determine each player's physiological reactions to the conversation.
In turn, this helps facilitate talking about each other's feelings towards these sensitive subjects and getting around them. The disk's AV system can also pick up the tone of voice, creating an even more accurate emotion prediction.
As soon as they begin the game, the disk greets the players with some icebreaker questions to get everyone settled.
As the disk understands the players' comfort level via biometrics, it starts with a question related to the chosen category.
The players start talking and sharing their thoughts and experiences. The disk continues to visualize the players’ emotions based on biometric tracking and fact-checking when required.
Reach out for full process and final results
