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An interactive checklist that helps kids develop and follow bedtime routines
TIMELINE
3 months
ADVISOR
Scott Ichikawa, Jon Froehlich
TOOLS
Arduino, Circuit Playground Express, Figma, Laser printing
TEAM
Carista Eliani, Minchu Kulkarni, Emily Shu
THE PROBLEM
Establishing a consistent bedtime routine for children is challenging due to various factors, causing parents stress and anxiety and making it hard to assist their children build healthy habits.
OVERALL PROCESS
Establishing a consistent bedtime routine for children is challenging due to various factors, causing parents stress and anxiety and making it hard to assist their children build healthy habits.
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
Establishing a consistent bedtime routine for children is challenging due to various factors, causing parents stress and anxiety and making it hard to assist their children build healthy habits.
DELIVERABLES
Establishing a consistent bedtime routine for children is challenging due to various factors, causing parents stress and anxiety and making it hard to assist their children build healthy habits.
CONTEXT
Explorations
Overall background
The design prompt was to design a new interactive digital-physical artifact that mediates care in the home.
How I explored the potential problem space
To explore the potential problem space, I observed the things that happened around me in a home setting and asked myself these questions:
What does care mean to me?
How do I provide care to people around me?
How can I improve the way I care for others?
Defining what "care" means by ideating
The team dove deep into literature and products in the market to understand the existing solutions. Then, we ideated and sketched out the potential ideas that could demonstrate what "care" means to us individually.
CONTEXT
Problem Setting
Down-selecting to the parent-child care
To narrow down our problem space, we used a dot-voting method, taking into account factors like alignment with the design prompt, feasibility, peer feedback, and personal interest.
As a result, we focused on two areas centered on care within the domain of child-parent relationships.
Using preliminary research to establish the problem
After conducting more preliminary research on home challenges related to child-parent relationships, the team found that some kids struggle with bed wetting problems even after being potty trained, and one of the reasons for this problem was not using the bathroom before bed.
Based on this finding, we set our target audience to be kids that are within the age of 5 - 8, and we landed on the following design challenge:
HYPOTHESIS
Identifying Assumptions
Recognizing my own assumptions
Based on the preliminary research, I made some assumptions of how kids don’t want to use the bathroom because the experience of going to the bathroom is not fun enough to motivate them.
I also assumed that children aged 5 to 8 would be rebellious, refusing to listen to their parents who told them what to do, and I wanted to verify these assumptions in my future steps.
Communicating our assumptions as a team
After discussion, my team realized that we were all under the impression that children enjoy positive reinforcement. As a result, our goal was to use positive reinforcement to encourage children to use the bathroom before going to bed, and we wanted to use prototypes to test this hypothesis.
Prototyping as research
To assess children's behaviors and confirm the need for our intervention, my team used physical prototyping methodologies that provide qualitative insights into user behavior and mental models while remaining cost-effective to iterate.
Throughout the process, I was in responsible for structuring the study plan and identifying the research objectives and assumptions that needed to be validated. To understand why children/parents acted the way they did after each prototype test, I conducted semi-structured interviews with participants after each test and synthesized data with my team.
RESEARCH
Desk Research
Researching about positive reinforcement for kids
I first did research on what kinds of things kids enjoy seeing as a motivation to encourage them to do things, and I discovered that children are drawn to bright and colorful things because their brain is still developing a sense of vision.
Because of this finding, I encouraged my team to use a light show as one of the forms in our design to motivate kids, and I created a mini prototype to get a sense of what a light show would look and feel.
Researching about the bathroom space
The team also conducted desk research on a child’s bathroom. We noticed that many households use toilet seats to assist their children with potty training, so we considered developing a child toilet seat that detects when the child sits on a toilet.
Since parents often have to instruct their children, the team also decided to use voice assistance to inform the children about the next step and reward them after using the restroom.
More about me
My work style
When I design, I use an iterative approach (since there is no such thing as a “perfect design”) and consider how my design will seem to those who may be harmed by it. I'm interested in understanding not just how to improve a product's user experience, but also how we can use foresight to design ethically, displaying respect for the individual or community.
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