Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards 2012! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

• Channel of Mindfulness
• Designer: Yufan Wang
• Location: Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design
• Category: Interaction
• Award: Student Runner up

Bringing mindfulness (paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally) in to our day-to-day lives is key to spiritual growth. Channel of Mindfulness creates a new way to help inexperienced practitioners to discover and integrate mindfulness in their everyday life.

The design includes two communicating parts: a handheld tangible device and an iPhone application. The idea is to help people live in the moment through listening and concentrating on some meditative sounds. By paying closer attention to listening, assisted with a rolling gesture, a higher stage of mind—mindfulness and awareness—will be created.

How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury? I paid continuous attention to the Core 77 Design Award website. So I knew the date on which you would announce the result of the Interaction category and I watched the live announcement.

What's the latest news or development with your project? For the project itself there is no further development yet, but it really opens up some design opportunities to create more meaningful apps which are enhanced by external accessories. Right now, I'm working on a research project on this topic and it involves both technical and design points of view.

What is one quick anecdote about your project? I started this project with a very broad and abstract topic—spirituality and spiritual growth. In the very early stages, I had a very hard time to narrow it down and frame out the design challenge. Then I did my research in the Copenhagen meditation center and interviewed some experienced meditators—the most valuable insights about meditation were generated from that. It helped me to be more clear about the design direction and also drove the project from spirituality to mindfulness.

What was an "a-ha" moment from this project? After the first round of prototyping, I focused on finding a comfortable gesture with a certain amount of attention which will help people focus on listening. The "a-ha" moment came when I saw a picture of a Tibetan prayer wheel. I built a quick prototype to test the rolling gesture and it proved that this was what I was looking for and it also gave a strong metaphorical meaning that fit well with the project.