Rhythm

Telling time through scent.

Rhythm is a time-based, scent-rotating diffuser that helps postpartum mothers rebuild a daily routine through gentle morning-day-night scent cues.

In Fall 2025, my partner and I designed Cultura, a Bluetooth speaker built for the realities of family-owned food truck kitchens.

Cultura was built around a use case the market hardly focuses on: shared music as a working tool for morale and connection, not leisure.

In Fall 2025, my partner and I designed Cultura, a Bluetooth speaker built for the realities of family-owned food truck kitchens.

Cultura was built around a use case the market hardly focuses on: shared music as a working tool for morale and connection, not leisure.

A solo project spanning user research, product design, and user interface, it translates the psychology of habit formation into a small, quiet object built to survive life with a newborn.

Year

2025

1 month

Discipline

User Interface

Branding

Prototyping

An overlooked painpoint.

Early postpartum mothers face difficulty reclaiming personal identity often from these 2 reasons.

Loss of structure

Sleep deprivation, infant care demands, and role changes strip away the routines mothers relied on.

Deprioritized self-care

Small rituals and sensory comfort can boost well-being, but most mothers don't have the bandwidth.

Reclaiming their routine.

Research shows that consistent environmental cues, such as fragrance, strengthen behaviors and emotional states over time (Wood & Rünger, 2016), and brief, intentional rituals improve well-being and help mothers reclaim their identity (Lambermon et al., 2020).

What if we combine these facts?

The question

What if we merge aromatherapy with routine-based care through gentle scent cues, guiding the user back into their daily rhythm?

Barkin & Wisner

Lambermon

Wood & Rünger

The diffuser market

Diffusers have followed two waves:

air-purification-led devices, bulky and tech-heavy
personal well-being and mood

Xiaomi has an intensity-controlling feature, and Pura has a double scent feature, but neither of them uses scent as a sense of time.

Inside the diffuser

The prototype used an atomizer powered by a power bank, oscillating water into mist via a piezoelectric (PZO) element.

The component size pushed the design toward a compact, stacked form.

What is the design process?

Starting from their homes.

The process began by brainstorming everyday home and IoT products before narrowing toward diffusers then moved into a survey of postpartum mothers.

40% use a diffuser most when sick, a reminder that postpartum immunity dips make illness far more frequent than before giving birth.

80% ranked easy cleaning/refilling as most valuable, and 60% felt $30–$60 was a reasonable price point.

40% use a diffuser most when sick, a reminder that postpartum immunity dips make illness far more frequent than before giving birth.

80% ranked easy cleaning/refilling as most valuable, and 60% felt $30–$60 was a reasonable price point.

Ideations

Early ideations centered on a single shared opening for both mist output and water refill, keeping things simple and easy to use.

But that constraint kept pulling the forms toward a cylindrical shape.

Early ideations centered on a single shared opening for both mist output and water refill, keeping things simple and easy to use.

But that constraint kept pulling the forms toward a cylindrical shape.

I wanted something that could still feel calm and natural, evoking a subtle sense of wellness rather than just function.

Prototyping

Cardboard prototyping helped me work out the housing and component layout, revealing that I wasn't actually bound to a cylindrical form.

Foam opened up more organic shapes and surface exploration.

Cardboard prototyping helped me work out the housing and component layout, revealing that I wasn't actually bound to a cylindrical form.

Foam opened up more organic shapes and surface exploration.

Finalizing… twice.

The final design was 3D printed, then sealed for waterproofing and finished with spray paint.

When I housed the motherboard fully sealed inside the model, however, it shorted out. The entire prototype had to be cut open, resealed, and re-sprayed.

I've learned that in life, anything can happen, and you just gotta go with it.

(even if your project is due in 5 days)

I've learned that in life, anything can happen, and you just gotta go with it.

(even if your project is due in 5 days)

Fully detachable body.

Rhythm's silhouette echoes a stack of stones.

A quiet, grounding form meant to bring a sense of balance into the home.

Rhythm includes 4 parts: the base body, filter body, aroma capsule, and a button.

Cleaning is much easier with the detachable filter cap and water tank.

Packaging

Packaging includes 1 diffuser body and 4 aroma capsules.

Each aroma capsule includes 3 different scents for morning, day, and night.

The body is injection-molded from ABS composite plastic with a sand-textured finish.

The buttons and capsule were finished with a chrome PVD coating, distinguishing interactive touchpoints through material contrast.

Each capsule holds three fragrance chambers divided like slices of a circle.

Scent

Nature-inspired tones evoking calmness and tranquility through low saturation and earthy warmth.

Each aroma capsules include according notes of scent for morning, day, and night.

Smart rotation through the Rhythm app.

Users choose their scent rotation schedule, and the rest happens on its own.

Users can also browse each capsule's scent notes and mood.

Rather than just a smart controller, the app becomes a subtle companion to the user's sleep and routine.

Since the diffuser knows when the morning scent turns on, that rhythm becomes the basis for a quiet progress tracker, occasionally paired with a quick morning check-in for how they slept.

What did I learn from this?

Ideate without anchoring

Once an idea takes hold, the brain keeps pulling back toward it, even against your own intentions. I learned to actively let go of first ideas to stay open to better ones.

Immerse fully in the user

Submerging myself in a specific group's world turned out to be genuinely enjoyable. I learned to enjoy the process of truly stepping into someone else's shoes.

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