Breathscape

Industry

Product Design

Year

2026

A smartwatch-paired breathing app, with a physical origami kit that turns HRV data into a ritual.

Services

Figma
Photoshop
D3.js
Physical Prototyping

Brief

Breathscape started as a self-quantification assignment in a course called Data as Material, turning an everyday curiosity into a data story. I wanted to see whether breathing exercises could improve my own low heart rate variability (HRV) — a marker of how well the nervous system adapts to stress — so I logged resonance breathing sessions morning and evening, pulled the data from a Garmin smartwatch, and visualized the results in D3.js.

Finding

How might we create a physical model that visually represents breathing, using a soft material that embodies the lightness of breath? Inspired by artists like Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Karolina Maszkiewicz, paper and origami became the answer — a sculpture prototype that evolved into a fun, at-home kit paired with the app.

About the Data

Visualizing HRV, one breath at a time.

Ten minutes of resonance breathing in the morning, twenty in the evening — aggregated from a Garmin smartwatch and charted in D3.js to see whether the practice was actually moving the needle on heart rate variability over time.

Breathscape App

The app pairs with your smartwatch to suggest breathing exercises based on your sleep quality, heart rate variability, and pulse ox from the night before.

Breathscape Origami Kit

An optional product pairing that teaches you to fold an origami breathing sculpture, visualizing six popular breathing exercises. Each envelope ships with a petal box to hang the finished piece, folding instructions, and origami paper grouped by exercise.

Social Media & Branding

Instagram carried tutorials, breathing exercises, and user-generated content, paired with three reels — a kit unboxing, an origami tutorial, and the final folded sculpture. The back of each envelope hides a QR code to a relaxing Spotify playlist for folding along to.

Detail

What's inside the envelope.

Strings, a petal box to hang the finished structure, origami folding instructions, and origami paper grouped by breathing exercise.

Breathscape envelope back, with Spotify QR code

Origami paper grouped by breathing exercise

Next Project Beneath the Surface