Yihan Bian

About

Yihan Bian is a designer who explores the relationship between humans and the environment with a background in industrial design and innovation design. During her study at RCA, she explores and thinks in interdisciplinary, such as materials, botany, etc. She aims to solve the world's complex problems through collaboration across disciplines.

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How long has it been since you talked about your emotion with your partner? Based on my case study on 

night shift workers and their partners, l found that different physical and mental states can affect their 

communication with their partners. My project is a device that records emotions in a bank. Recording 

emotions, allow couples to start a conversation when they meet by talking about their emotion.

EMOTION BANK

The Emotion Bank is an installation that records emotions at work through input buttons. Emotions are divided into positive emotions and negative emotions; Each emotion is divided into three levels. Change the pointer through the button to form a mood diagram for the day. Couples can start their dinner conversation by talking about emotions.
The divided sides represent night workers and their partners; Blue is the night worker, and orange is their partner.

London claims to be a 24 hours city while the night workers are bare to be seen and get to know by the public. There are more than 7 million adults working at night, and over 50% of them are key workers, across our society and other sectors like social care, hospitals, security, law enforcement, and transport, all worked tirelessly to ensure the country remained in functioning order when the day started for the rest of us. These night shift workers face a set of health, social, psychological and family challenges because of their working patterns.

Compare with the daytime workers, night shift workers barely have time to attend to family and social activities, leading to difficulty maintaining relationships. Night shift workers are 6 times more likely to get divorced because the couple has an opposite daily schedule. And for night workers there's a lot of emotional neglect because the partner is asleep. On the other hand, for night shift workers, the emotion of their partners is also unknown because they need adequate rest during the day. As a result, less communication leads to more arguments.

EMOTION BANK —— WORK FLOW

EMOTION BANK —— PROCESS

TWO SIZES OF NIGHT SHIFT WORK

Prototype - Market — High visibility clothing, as a concurrent element in the scene, must be worn by every worker on the market site for safe construction.
Prototype - Concierge — For the concierge, high visibility clothing is not worn most of the time. But it will be on their desks all year long, for an official situation one day.
Prototype - Birthday Party for Concierge solely — The concierge alone take out the cake his family had prepared during the day and began to taste it while watching CCTV.
Prototype - Birthday Party in the Market — How do workers in the midnight market celebrate the birthday of a colleague whose birthday is today? They might share a small cake, say a few blessings together， blow out the candles and enjoy a break from their busy night shift work.

Workstation for Night — The audio records the sounds of two scenes. When listening with headphones, the left earphone shows the busy market at night, full of cars honking, walking and workers Shouting. On the right, the concierge completes the night shift work alone, refreshing the phone and browsing the web.

The workstation consists of two parts: on the left is a scenario of the New Spitalfields Market, where furniture is rare, but market workers are good at using their environment and materials. For example, the bay of the forklift plus the fruit box can be their chair, long table for eating, cashier desk, etc; On the right is the concierge scenario. They have a better working environment but only electronics and plants for the company.