Meet the Bloombox!

28-04-2023

The Bloombox is a free and open-access collection of tools to help teams and companies build science-branded, inclusive, and effective projects that promote human flourishing. GEMH Lab aims to provide designers, artists, developers, scientists, and other relevant professionals with the tools they need to make their interdisciplinary tech-for-good project successful. The Bloombox consists of both tips-n-tricks as well as caveats, as we work to transform our experiences into practical tools to make sure you can capitalise on our successes and mistakes. Additionally, we provide concrete templates, checklists, and planners to create clarity in these often-complex projects. By collecting our lessons learned in the Bloombox, we hope to contribute to more human-centered and positive digital solutions.

Three (3) pillars of the Bloombox:

  • Human Factors: Build your team and vision.
  • Knowledge IP: Consolidate your unique knowledge.
  • Action-Based Tools: Organize and streamline your project.

Our aim for Bloombox is to help teams develop and strengthen their technologies for mental health and help to rigorously design the scientific evaluation of their effectiveness. We want to build the Bloombox, so it suits the varied needs of all the teams. We want the tools to be relevant and useful, not just steps taken for rote purposes.

To achieve this goal, in partnership with the Templeton World Charity Foundation, we funded four (4) projects that align with our mission of developing and scientifically testing technologies that promote human flourishing. The four selected projects were awarded a grant and are required to implement relevant parts of the Bloombox Toolkit, a set of principles, methodologies, tools, and mindset practices for structured, science-based, high-quality development and assessment of transformative tech products. The projects selected are:

  • The Adolescent Sleep Savoring Toolkit: a technology that provides support and skills to improve sleep for adolescents living in high-conflict areas.
  • Digital Healing Library: an online community in which people connect and collaborate with each other to develop, refine, and support social healing.
  • Everyone Gets It Here: a youth-centered online community that provides support for social, emotional, spiritual, and mental wellbeing among grieving youth.
  • The Interbeing Protocol: a protocol that delivers the benefits of traditional silent meditation while cultivating intimacy and strengthening bonds between humans.

Project Overviews:

Adolescent Sleep Savoring Toolkit

Supporting sleep through a technology-based savoring toolkit.

Adolescents are short on sleep and these sleep deficits exact both immediate and long-term costs on their wellbeing. Sleep and emotional health are closely interrelated. Sleep deficits have a direct negative effect on emotional functioning, and emotional difficulties interfere with sleep. This negative spiral is amplified enormously for youth immersed in conflict, as they are exposed to traumatic images and experiences, threats to their safety and security, and to war-related disruptions impacting their families, schools, communities, and daily lives.

The Adolescent Sleep Savoring Toolkit is about providing adolescents living in high-conflict regions with the support and skills required to reduce bedtime rumination and improve sleep duration and quality.

Digital Healing Library

To support social healing — with one another, in community.

Every one of us experiences grief, injury, and loss. This impacts not just us, but our loved ones and broader communities, as well. The structural inaccessibility that exists due to sky-high costs of mental health, specialized healthcare, and unequal supply is compounded by cultural norms — we lack robust rituals and mediums for healing. Grieving is social — and so is healing. We aim to help people heal together via digital and hybrid technologies.

The Digital Healing Library aims to deliver a proof-of-concept and a foundation for a communal Healing Library and a broader networked healing community. We envision a platform via which people participate, share, and connect with each other, and collaborate in the development and refinement of future healing resources.

Everyone Gets It Here

Designing an online play-based community for grieving youth.

ExperienceCraft is a youth-centered online community for grieving youth, composed of a custom Minecraft and Discord server.  Together the servers provide a safe, moderated, grief-aware online community for youth where they can build, chat, play, and share with one another across a wide variety of in-game activities.

It is a place where:

  • Grief is acknowledged and normalized
  • Youth have opportunities to meaningfully contribute to a community where they feel a sense of belonging
  • Youth can share a range of emotions and both give and get support from peers and caring adults

Everyone Gets It Here aims to identify, develop, and test evidence-based strategies for supporting social, emotional, spiritual, and mental wellbeing among grieving youth.

The Interbeing Protocol

To integrate a diverse array of perspectives into the formal Interbeing Protocol.

Social meditation brings the benefits of traditional silent meditation while simultaneously cultivating intimacy and strengthening bonds between humans. Over the past 12 years, Kenneth Folk and the Buddhist Geeks team, have trained hundreds of people on how to facilitate social meditation. We’ve had to deeply consider what social meditation is, how it works, which instructions have what effects, how to make the practices more trauma-informed, etc. During this iterative design process, we’ve developed a basic protocol that describes all the major elements & rules pertaining to the practice of social meditation.

The Interbeing Protocol aims to take the current version of the Social Meditation Protocol through a transdisciplinary process of further refinement to upgrade our current set of rules & instructions, so that they are useful, not just to practitioners and facilitators of social meditation, but also for potential scientific researchers, software developers, artists, entrepreneurs, and the like.

Author

Jeanine Jennings

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