Anchoring Love

When someone struggles with substance use, nearly every resource, every program, every conversation centers on that one person. But the people around them, friends, family, spouses, and partners, carry their own confusion, fear, guilt, anger, and grief, often with no outlet at all. Our research kept landing on the same line, and it became the thesis of the whole project.

The research kept surfacing the same shape. Different demographics, different relationships to the person using drugs, same lonely middle. To keep design decisions honest, we grounded the work in two composite people drawn from real interviews, and returned to them at every fork.

Three questions shaped everything that followed.

Interviews with clinicians, program leads, and families kept returning to a shared observation: the system for people who use drugs was rich, and the system for the people around them was almost nonexistent. A few voices captured it plainly.

Affinity mapping across interviews and desk research produced five insights that ran under everything else.

Early ideation moved fast and wide. Two directions carried furthest, and each was tested against a real situation through storyboards before we trusted it.

Two storyboards made the tension concrete. Ariel came in tangled, unable to name what she was feeling. A friend gave her a zine whose stories mirrored her own. She started writing privately, and eventually shared her story publicly to help someone else the way she'd been helped.

Rosa was carrying emotions she had no idea what to do with. She found a local Create to Heal meeting, RSVP'd, and showed up not knowing what to expect. She left feeling heard for the first time in a long while, and in the weeks after was finally able to see conversational progress with the person she loved.

Neither concept was wrong, but neither was quite right either. Concept validation surfaced a real tension: what people said they wanted and what they actually reached for didn't line up. That mismatch is what pushed the direction further.

Testing happened in three streams at once: the physical form in people's hands, the mid-fidelity app in small user rounds, and the whole direction in front of practitioners who work in harm reduction directly. Each stream corrected something the others could not.

Before any digital screen existed, we built a paper model of what became the Anchor. Cardboard cubes, folded by hand, arranged and rearranged on a table. The question was whether an abstract shape could hold an internal state well enough to be worth building.

Mid-fidelity screens went in front of users in short rounds. Three screens surfaced problems worth acting on: the check-in space, the reflections view, and the home screen.

The validation round paired qualitative feedback with a card sort on the labeling system, a concept-validation A/B test on the Anchor's physical form, and a script rehearsal of the HRW meeting structure. That round produced the first System Usability Scale score for the app.

A second round tested the visual brand and the art therapy exercise list directly with practitioners.

Alongside user testing, we ran the concept and the physical form past practitioners who work in this space directly. Their read on the direction is what let us commit to it.

Anchoring Love became a harm-reduction alternative to twelve-step and Nar-Anon-style programs, built for the loved ones themselves. Art and narrative therapy sit at its center, aimed at building emotional intelligence and self-awareness rather than delivering advice. It runs across four connected parts: the Anchor, a physical object; an app of guided exercises and a community forum; one-on-one and group meetings; and the site that ties them together.

The Anchor is where the digital turns tangible. Its blocks are arranged, rearranged, decorated, and redecorated to mirror a relationship in constant flux, because breaking and building are both part of the process. It lets someone take an abstract internal state out of their head and into a physical space they can finally put words to.

The meeting format needed to be facilitated with little to no prior knowledge of harm reduction or therapy, so four commitments carried the interface. A prompt, not a prescription, exercise cards guide reflection on someone's own terms, read or heard through audio narration, with no clinician required to begin. Community that already exists, loved ones already seek each other out, so the forum surfaces that community instead of asking people to build it from nothing. Present, not performing, in meetings the controls stay out of the way, showing up is enough. And support that outlasts the hour, conversation continues in the community after a meeting ends, so support isn't tied to a scheduled slot.