Interaction for consumer product

Luna

A two week collaboration project together with product designers. In the team we where two interaction designers and one product designer. My focus was together with Yijia to develop the interactions and sounds. We had to design a concept that combined product-, interaction- and sound design. Our topic for this challenge was to make something that engages children through sound.

APPROACH

The focus was on sound and how to develop sound for products. Therefore sound was a huge part in the development of concept as well. We learned how to create our own sounds with the foley technique and how to edit and cut them.

Challenge

How might we engage children with sound to keep the daily routines? The challenge was to develop a concept, test and execute it within two weeks.

PROJECT INFO

Winter 2018, 2 weeks

Partner: Umeå Institute of Design

Team: Yijia Tao, Alexandre de Bastiani

Interaction design, Product design, Sound design

Interaction and sound design

Empowering children and families to keep their daily routine through play and sound

Luna

Luna is a companion for children and a helping hand for parents to help children keep the daily routines and activities that needs to be done. Luna makes it fun for children to perform these activities by sometimes making it into a game or contest or sometimes just doing the task along with them.

Challenge and opportunity

To keep the daily routines is something that many families are struggling with. It is never fun to brush your teeth or to get dressed if you don’t want to. Or if you are afraid of water why do you need to shower? Parents don’t want to force their children to something they don’t like but if they don’t, kids will not understand why they have to do it tomorrow but not yesterday. This is where we saw an opportunity to make a holistic tool to help parents and children make routines fun to keep.

Plan together

One big part of Luna is her activity magnets. Together with their parents the child can plan and structure the activities that needs to be done by themselves and in their own routine. By giving them a little bit of responsibility the child will think it is more important and fun to do these activities such as brushing their teeth.

Nudge and activation and reward

When the morning or night routine are set to start Luna are nudging the child to start doing the routine. She can for example begin to get tired and yawning when it is time for bed or keep sleeping in the morning to indicate to the child that it is still night time and they need to sleep a little bit more. When the child acknowledged Luna and wants to activate the routine the child press the stomach or mouth and she will begin with the next activity from the planning magnets.

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At the end of the day when the child is done with all the activities in the routine he/she can get a reward from Luna by again touching the stomach to the magnets. She then check if every activity is done and makes a rewarding sound so that the child feel that he/she has accomplished the daily task and feel proud of themselves.

Sounds

The sounds for Luna is inspired by birds when they are happy and bubbles. We wanted her to have the sound of a character and give her personality through her voice and sounds. In the magnets we wanted the sound to sound more like a product to distinguish them from Luna and highlight that they are two separate things but still connected in the association of bubbles.

Luna is happy

When Luna is happy and the child is playing with her she once in a while makes this happy sound.

Luna is sleepy

When Luna is tired and it is time to go to bed she starts to yawn.

Luna gives reward at the end of the day

At the end of the day the child and Luna can check if all the activities has been completed. If they have Luna is rewarding and cheering with the child.

Magnets when connecting

When the first and the last magnet are connected with the right activities it makes this sound:

Research process

This video explains the process of developing Luna. We conducted interviews with parents and a primary school teacher, user tests and built prototypes and a model of our final concept.

Need of routines

Children needs routines to feel safe and to be prepared of what is coming next. By having routines in the every day life the day can go by smoother. In primary school the entire day consist of routines and after a while the children are even sometimes starting to play the routines according to Anna, primary school teacher.

Make own choices

If children make their own choices they are more likely to follow through with what they chose. By letting children add their own details/choices to the routine they are increasing their independence while there are still structure. For example what shirt to put on.

Sense of accomplishment

As any of us children feel a sense of accomplishment after performing a task. Jennifer is telling us how her child love to cross out the days when he has been at primary school in the calendar just because he wants to see when he accomplished something and get to cross it out as a reward.

“You always need to consider the effect it can give later if you make the ‘have to’ routines a bad experience. The children will then consider it a bad thing to brush their teeth if you force them too. But sometimes you have too, otherwise they don’t want to do it next time.”

-Jennifer, mother of two

Development of sound, what do children like?

We used the foley technique to develop the sounds. We tried to make animal like sounds that could represent Luna and invite the children for both play and action. Something happy animal like and not to demanding but still when needed with a sense of urge and nudge.

User testing with Wizard of Oz

We used the wizard of oz method to test our concept, with the main focus of sound. We let the user try and interact with the prototype and then we played the sounds behind the scenes so that the user would believe it came from Luna.

Anna helped us distinguished what sounds that the children would like. For example if you play the sound of something familiar when it is time to sleep the children will want to get up and look for that thing instead of relax and sleep.

Conclusion

Being a two week project we had to take fast decisions and act on them accordingly without much of reflection. To work in a diverse team with both different skill-set and background are one of the most valuable things with this project. That was most inspiring and motivating during the project and I think it reflects in the result.

My Contribution

I contributed throughout the entire process from user research, ideation, and user testing. As the interaction designer of the team together with Yijia, our main focus was to develop how to interact with LUNA and how the magnets and LUNA would interact with each other and the user. I also had a main part in the sound development and storytelling.

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