introspect — Natalia Gulbransen-Diaz

NATALIA GULBRANSEN-DIAZ

The future demands hope and imagination. I’m passionate about deploying critical, design-led approaches to address complex social challenges, with particular focus on investigating how we can design with/and/for communities envisioning positive futures.

Through practice-led inquiry and real-world collaborations with Australian NPOs, I work to understand the conditions and relationships that enable design to be generative rather than extractive, bridging theory and application to create responsive, situated engagements that contribute to ongoing conversations about design's role in community and public life.

My recently completed PhD, Design with/and/for Value, explored how design can support non-profit organisations in realising their collective ambitions beyond economic measures.

Email
CV
Publications [Google Scholar]

Research

Design with/and/for Value
Waste to Resilience: Sanitation against Stunting and Climate Vulnerability in Indonesian Informal Coastal Areas
Computational Creativity in the Classroom: Student-Led Co-Design of Generative AI Pedagogies in Design
Sonic Street Technologies: Australia
Broadening Horizons: Using curiosity to diversify behaviour
Usability Issues in Self-Service Technologies
COVID-19 Smart IoT Screening System Pilot at Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network
Introspect

Introspect

Index

Undergraduate Thesis (B. Design Computing, Honours I), 2019
The University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

[design innovation] [design for wellbeing] [nursing]

Recognition:
Good Design Award Gold Winner - Next Gen 2020 [View]
Global Grad Show, Dubai Design Week, 2019

Publications:
Feng, L., Gulbransen-Diaz, N., Nusem, E., Straker, K., Wrigley, C. (2019) Designing Digital Systems to Prevent Emotional Fatigue: Promoting Vocalisation and Reflective Practices within MCS Nursing. ASAIO 65th Annual Conference, San Francisco: American Society for Artificial Internal Organs

Feng, L., Gulbransen-Diaz, N., Nusem, E., Straker, K., Wrigley, C. (2019) Designing for nurses: exploring emotional challenges to inform digital solutions. XD 2019 ‘The International Conference of Experience Design, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Gold Coast: Griffith Centre for Design & Innovation Research.

Introspect is an audio-based self-care application designed to help nurses process emotional distress. By guiding users through a private session of vocalisation and reflection – and playing their voice back in a subtly modulated tone – it creates the psychological distance needed to move from overwhelm to clarity. The project received a Gold Good Design Award in 2020 and was presented at Global Grad Show, Dubai Design Week.

THE PROBLEM
Nursing is one of the most emotionally demanding professions in the world. In Australia, 65% of nurses report experiencing burnout — not because they don't care, but because they care so deeply. The expectation of compassionate, patient-centred care leaves nurses uniquely vulnerable to what researchers call "the cost of caring": compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout.

Existing workplace interventions like Employee Assistance Programs were widely known but rarely used — too inaccessible, too formal, or simply not a part of workplace culture. There was a clear opportunity for design to find a different path: something private, independent, and grounded in how nurses actually experience and process distress.

THE DESIGN

Introspect works like this: a nurse opens the app after a difficult shift, and a calm, non-human voice asks them to talk about their day. The system listens. It plays the recording back at a slightly lower pitch before asking: “having heard that back, what are you thinking?”

The conversation model is is direct, utilising neutral prompts rather than open questions — firm enough to draw out honest reflection, open enough to follow wherever the nurse needs to go. The opening prompt, "tell me about your day," is deliberately instructive rather than interrogative. Supplementary prompts keep the session moving and encourage nurses to go deeper, helping surface the root cause of distress rather than just its surface symptoms.

The voice modulation is the heart of the design. Lowering pitch by two semitones creates just enough distance for a nurse to hear their own experience differently — the way you might hear a friend describe the same situation and suddenly feel permission to say that was really hard. In psychological research this is called self-distancing, and it's associated with wiser, more compassionate reasoning about personal problems.

The bodiless orb removes any suggestion of judgement. No face to read, no relationship to manage. Nurses described this as freeing — a space where they didn't have to worry about how they came across. The session is private and leaves no trace — critical for a population with deep concerns about confidentiality.

WHAT WE FOUND

On nursing distress
The research confirmed that distress in nursing is rarely singular or straightforward. Nurses described a profession that systematically sets them up to absorb difficulty — patient trauma, family conflict, impossible workloads, institutional frustrations — with little formal space to process it. Existing supports like Employee Assistance Programs were widely known but deeply underused. As one participant put it: "everybody talks about it — I don't see a lot of people actually doing it." The barriers were practical (inaccessible, time-consuming) but also deeply personal: fears of judgement, of being seen as a burden, of confidentiality breaches that could follow them professionally.

What emerged most clearly was not just what distressed nurses, but what they needed to cope: catharsis — genuine emotional release, not just management — combined with the ability to gain perspective on their own experience. Without both, distress didn't resolve. It accumulated.

On Introspect
88.5% of nurses in the validation study believed Introspect would be beneficial for coping with emotional distress. 92.3% affirmed that both vocalisation and reflection were valuable techniques for processing emotional challenges. In the hands-on evaluation, what those numbers translated to in practice was something quieter and more personal: nurses describing a shift in how they held their own experiences.

Participants spoke of hearing their modulated voice played back and suddenly feeling permission to acknowledge what they'd been through — "it's kind of like you've taken that slight burden off you." Others found that the distance created by the voice modulation helped them think more clearly: "because sometimes it gets all muddled in your head... hearing it back it makes more sense." One participant described the experience simply as "a conversation with myself" — which, in many ways, was exactly the point.

The research confirmed that vocalisation and reflection, when made private, accessible, and non-judgemental, can function as genuine adaptive coping strategies. Not replacements for human connection — nurses were clear that nothing replaces talking to someone who truly understands — but a real resource for the moments when that isn't possible, or when you're simply not ready.

REFLECTION

What this project reinforced, more than anything, was the value of taking a problem seriously enough to really go there. The research — twelve in-depth interviews, a 52-person validation survey, a longitudinal evaluation with clinical nurses — was ambitious for an undergraduate thesis, and that ambition shaped what was possible. Concentrated, specific design interventions can be incredibly powerful when they're grounded in thorough contextual discovery and honest engagement with what's already out there. Introspect is evidence of that, and a foundation I'd be glad to hand to anyone continuing this work.

A protoype of Introspect is available as a web app. The full research is published in the proceedings of ASAIO 2019 and XD 2019.