Silver Digital and Electronic Device Design · 2021
Ston Aroma Inhaler
- A' Design Award 2021 Silver Winner in Digital and Electronic Device Design
- Awarded April 15, 2021
- CLIENT: Nosigner
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 51,332
- Verification code 95ECB1216B · Verify this award
About Ston Aroma Inhaler
Ston provides you a healthy and mindful break, as an alternative to smoking and drinking. Nosigner named the device Breather, as a reference to the unique mindful experience it provides. Although the structure is similar to an electronic cigarette, by adjusting the flow of air as well as other factors, you can experience something closer to a deep breath. This is the tool to change a harmful break with smoking cigarettes into a healthy one for mentally and physically.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- “ston” provides you a healthy and mindful break, as an alternative to smoking and drinking.
We named the device BREATHER, as a reference to the unique mindful experience it provides. Although the structure is similar to an electronic cigarette, by adjusting the flow of air as well as other factors, you can experience something closer to a deep breath. This is the tool to change a harmful break with smoking cigarettes into a healthy one for mentally and physically. - Production Technology
- We took so much time for the appearance of the product. “ston” is a stone-shaped, organically curved, stone-moulded device made of a one-piece aluminium enclosure thanks to a technique called metal squeezing. It is a unique and difficult technique that allows the aluminium to be squeezed to expand inward beyond 180 degrees, with no parting lines. This is all thanks to the high-level production control technology that Japan has developed.
- Inspiration
- "ston" is a healthy inhalation device that allows you to inhale caffeine and GABA. The lighting pattern also helps regulate the rhythm of the breath. Similar to meditation in Zen or yoga, it helps the mind find balance and be calm, peacefully breathing in and out. Smoking is not only harmful to your body but also bad for the environment since you would have cigarette butts after you smoked it. “ston” offers a special experience that can never be had with a cigarette break.
- Image Credits
- Product Photograph: CCDN (Yuichi Hisatsugu)
Brand Image Photograph: BREATHER Co., Ltd.
Colors of Ston Aroma Inhaler
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G0E5 ShopGrand Interview about Ston Aroma Inhaler
Ston began not with the idea of a product, but with a question about why people take breaks at all. We noticed that a cigarette break, a coffee break, even a long sigh, all share one hidden gesture: a deliberate pause and a deep breath. The harmful part was never the pause itself, but what people reached for to justify it. Our vision was to give that universal moment a healthier object. We described the underlying experience as "updating the deep breath," and built an entirely new product category around it, which we named BREATHER. From there, every decision — the stone-like form, the rhythm of light, the tuned airflow — became an attempt to make a single deep breath feel intentional and restorative rather than incidental. Reaching the Silver A' Design Award confirmed that this quiet, behavioural reframing of an everyday ritual resonated with people far beyond its origin.
We wanted Ston to feel less like an electronic gadget and more like a stone you might pick up beside a river, so the body could not look manufactured. A seamless aluminium enclosure, formed by squeezing the metal into a single closed shell, let us remove the visible seams, screws and parting lines that normally reveal a device. The result is a continuous, cool, weighted surface that invites the hand to hold and turn it, the way one instinctively handles a smooth pebble. Technically this was demanding, because forming a fully enclosed organic aluminium volume resists the flat, panelled geometries that metalworking usually prefers. We accepted that difficulty deliberately: the integrity of the form is what allows Ston to read as a calm natural object rather than a tool, and that perception is essential to the rest and mindfulness the device is meant to encourage.
Conventional electronic cigarettes are engineered to imitate smoking: they reward a short, sharp draw with dense, visible vapour and a throat sensation. We tuned Ston in the opposite direction. By calibrating the air channel and the resistance of the draw, we encourage a slow, long, diaphragmatic inhalation — the kind of breath a person takes when they consciously try to relax. The vapour is intentionally subtle, because the value is not the cloud but the act of breathing itself. In effect, the device guides the body into the mechanics of a genuine deep breath, and then lets the user simply notice how that feels. This is why we describe the experience as closer to a deep breath than to smoking: the gesture, not the substance, is doing the therapeutic work, and the design's role is to make that gesture easy, natural and pleasant to repeat.
When we examined why people interrupt their day, two opposite needs kept appearing: the wish to sharpen up, and the wish to wind down. Rather than introduce unfamiliar compounds, we chose two substances people already turn to for exactly those moments. Caffeine, widely associated with focus and alertness, supports a "Power" experience for when someone needs to re-engage with a task. GABA, an amino acid associated with calm and relaxation, supports a "Calm" experience for when someone needs to release tension. Offering them as two clear modes lets a single ritual serve both states of mind, so one device can accompany the whole arc of a working day. Just as importantly, both are taken in through the breath as taste and aroma rather than through combustion, with no nicotine and no toxic ingredients, which keeps the experience centred on wellbeing rather than dependency.
The light on Ston is not decoration; it is a pacing cue. Drawing on breathing practices found in Zen meditation and yogic breathing, where attention is anchored to a steady inhale and exhale, we translated that rhythm into a gentle, breathing pattern of light. As the light slowly swells, the user is invited to inhale; as it fades, to exhale. By giving breath an external, visual metronome, the device quietly slows a person down without instruction or effort of will. It is widely understood that lengthening and regularising the breath shifts the body toward a calmer state, and we wanted that shift to happen almost automatically, in the few seconds of an ordinary break. The lighting therefore turns an abstract instruction — "breathe more deeply" — into something the hand and the eye can follow together, making a moment of mindfulness accessible to anyone, anywhere.
We began from a simple hypothesis: people feel most at ease in natural settings — forests, plateaus, the bank of a river — and the objects found there are organic, weighted and smooth. The stone form grew directly from that observation, and specifically from rock balancing, a practice that, like Zen or yoga, concentrates and calms the mind. A stone asks to be held, turned and steadied in the palm, and that small tactile ritual is itself grounding. By giving Ston the silhouette and heft of a river stone, we removed the low-level anxiety that surrounds most electronics and replaced it with the reassurance of something that feels found in nature. The form is therefore not styling but a kind of therapy: it signals rest before the device is even used, and it is also the origin of the product's name. Holding Ston should already feel like the first half of a deep breath.
The clearest early signal came from the market itself. Sold exclusively online, Ston sold out within hours of release and rose to the top of Japan's health-appliance rankings, which told us that a great many people were actively searching for a healthier way to take their break. Beyond the numbers, what we set out to enable was a shift in the meaning of the pause — from reaching for a cigarette to reaching for a breath. People have increasingly adopted it during work, where the old habit was a smoke break and the new one is a moment of deliberate breathing, which is exactly the substitution the design was built to make appealing. We think of Ston less as a device that asks people to give something up, and more as an invitation to trade a harmful ritual for a pleasant one. That positive framing seems to be what makes the change feel sustainable rather than restrictive.
Cigarettes leave behind one of the most pervasive forms of litter on the planet: discarded filters that contain plastics and leach harmful residues into soil and water, alongside the smoke and ash that affect everyone nearby. A central concern for us was that the everyday break should stop generating that kind of waste. Ston is built as a lasting object rather than something thrown away after a single use; the breath it offers produces no ash, no butt to discard and no second-hand smoke. By making the durable device the centre of the ritual and keeping the consumable parts as minimal as possible, we move the habit away from the constant stream of single-use waste that smoking creates. We see this as part of the design's responsibility: a break that is healthier for the individual should also be lighter on the environment, and throughout development those two goals reinforced one another.
Most technology is designed to capture attention; Ston was designed to return it to the body. Earning the Silver A' Design Award for a device whose entire purpose is to help someone breathe suggests there is real appetite for what is sometimes called calm technology — products that support rest rather than compete for our engagement. We believe the most interesting frontier in wellness technology is not adding more data, screens or notifications, but designing for subtraction: tools that quietly restore focus, slow the breath and open small pockets of recovery inside a demanding day. By establishing BREATHER as a category in its own right, we hope to show that the break itself can be designed, and that future wellness devices might be measured not by how much they do, but by how gracefully they help us do less. Treated as a design problem, rest is a vast and largely untouched field.
At our studio we treat design as a tool for social change, not only as a way to make things attractive. Public-health problems such as smoking are rarely solved by prohibition alone, because they are bound up with deeply human needs — for a pause, for relief, for a moment that belongs only to oneself. Our approach was to honour that need and redirect it: instead of telling people to stop, we offered a more appealing object that satisfies the same impulse in a healthier way. Ston embodies this philosophy by turning a harmful daily ritual into a restorative one through desire rather than restriction. We see the role of design as building the bridge that makes the better choice also the more attractive one. If a small, stone-shaped device can shift countless ordinary breaks toward wellbeing, that is precisely the kind of quiet, scalable social change we hope our work can create.