-- Situation

According to CBS, every year 12.000 young people lose a parent before the age of 25. A devastating event, which has an enormous impact on your life.

Losing a parent when you’re still young is an exemption of the unwritten rule that your parents should be there to see you graduate, or even when you have children of yourself.

-- Problem

When faced with a big loss for the first time, we’re figuring out what we feel and what we need. And that can be hard.

There are descriptions of grief that tell you there’s a process to it, but nobody tells you how to handle the waves of grief that will hit you out of nowhere. That’s something you have to figure out for yourself.

But how do you get insight into how you can support yourself and how you’ve been feeling?

-- Action

For this challenge, I have gathered insights by speaking with a group of people who have lost their parent at a young age. We talked about their situation, and which challenges they faced.

I also brainstormed with professionals in the field of bereavement support, where we figured out the best way to help bereaved people is by helping them identify how they feel. This builds a foundation on which they can explore how they can support themselves, alone or with the help of others.

From here on I developed multiple concepts and prototypes, which led me to the version that is on display, which I submitted for my graduation.

-- Result

The result of this project is a mobile app that helps you keep track of your emotions and experience after the loss of a loved one, lets you look back into your experience from the past and gives you relevant information based on your actual grief experience to give you support for the future.

To this day, I'm still improving the concept by user tests to provide users with a better experience and getting insights more easily.