Initial Explorations

Children of split families can be facing different kind of challenges that stem from being between their parents.

Over four different prototypes I iterated on new ways to deal with these challenges.

One of the problems is that the back and forth between the two homes and potentially the daycare combined with the lack of understanding of time confuses the children and compromise their feeling of continuity.

When they are at daycare they sometimes don't know who's gonna pick them up. When they wake up at night they sometimes don't know where they are.

Could a physical installation help them to understand their agenda and therefore make the transition between their homes more seamless? With a first prototype I explored ways to give the children a better understanding of their schedule. I used a projection and physical tokens which should help the children better understand their week plan and provide them with an understanding what happens next and who's gonna take care of them.

Even though the interaction with the physical tokens worked well, the concept was too complicated and too abstract for young children to understand. As a result the prototype didn't have the desired effect.

Another issue is that separated parents miss out on a lot of moments that are important for the children to gain self confidence when they're not with them. They don't get the chance to witness and celebrate these moments with them. The parents don't send each other pictures so often and they usually don't have a shared photo album. Can pictures and videos be used as a medium to celebrate important moments with the parent who wasn’t there? With a second prototype I designed a service and implemented a working app that allows to celebrate the children's best moments and achievements together and reward the child for taking a step forward.

The app allows to take short videos of the children's important moments. A static image is created from the video and uploaded to the service. The service prints a physical sticker and an image and sends it to the child's parents. Mounting the sticker to the image allows the moment to come alive and celebrate it together as they hover their smart phone over the image.

This concept was well received by both parents and their children but at the same time it reminded the children that one of the parents misses out on more moments than the other one.

Another problem is that children of separated parents are mostly disconnected from one parent when they are staying with the other one. The parents decide when the child stays and with whom they can spend time. Would a storytelling platform make them feel more connected to the absent family members if the children can decide who reads a story with them? With the third prototype I designed a system that connects the child with the family members over stories. The child gets to decide who should be part of the storytelling time.

The family members record short parts of a story using an app. By arranging and assigning the narraters in different ways the children can then listen to different versions of that story on a digital or physical interface.

This concept has a lot of potential as the prototype seemed to have the desired effect of connecting them with remote family members. However, in some cases it causes the children to miss the absent family members even more.

The biggest issue that I found with split families is communication or the lack thereof. Not only between the parents but also between the children and the parents. Would they feel more comfortable to talk about feelings if it’s through a game? As a fourth prototype I designed a board game that should help the parents to find out what's on their children's mind. As this concept seemed to tackle a core problem of split families I decided to go forward with that one.

Iteration

I saw the potential in a board game for separated parents and their children to serve as a conversation platform. When they play the game with the child it allows everyone to express themselves through a game character and learn about each other's needs and wishes. One of the psychologists who I collaborated with, Dr. Elisabeth Maaß, said «The inner needs of children at this age are mainly expressed through play.». This gave me confidence that I was going in the right direction with a board game. As a design criterion I defined the product to be a non-digital solution. From what I observed, this seemed to be a good choice as a physical board game affords invention of new rules and mini games with the existing game components. The children are limited only by their own imaginations and creativity. In addition to that, holding something in their hands while they were thinking and playing had a calming effect on them.

The first version of the board game was divided in two sections each being about one of their homes. Different types of fields would among other things prompt them to tell about something they wish or about something they like/dislike about their home and the corresponding parent.

An early test with a 4.5 years old revealed that it was apparently fun to play despite the therapeutical character. Interesting things came up especially when talking about things that the child didn't like about each parent.

For the next iteration of the game I worked on the form factor and re-designed the game logic to be more diversified. I ran co-creation sessions with the children to help me figure this out.

Since I had found a form factor that was very well received by the children who I tested the game with, I decided to mainly focus on the game contents and the game interaction for the following iterations.

Designing the User Experience

There are a couple of important questions that came up after running the first few test sessions:

• What kind of prompts and questions can open up the right conversations?
• How can we allow the parents to reflect on the topics that come up during the game?
• How can we allow the child to leave the game with a positive thought even though they potentially talked about negative topics?
• How do we make the child stay connected with the game?
• How can we keep the game engaging over time?
• How can we make the game a competition without compromising its functionality as a communication tool?
• How does it affect the game if more than one parent and more than one child participates?

• Is the game duration right?

Answers to the above questions had to be found by iterating on the game logic, the game contents and the components.

Testing and Refining the User Experience

The game should remain interesting over time and physically appeal to different tastes. I realized that after the first test, when the children started to ask me if there was also a dinosaur or a Minions version. Therefore I co-created with children to come up with different themes so that the tiles can be replaced and to give it some sort of collector's value.

As for the game contents it's crucial to establish a set of prompts and questions that balance out fun and communication. The communicational questions should hit the sweet spot where the children have to reflect on their feelings but still feel comfortable to talk. Sometimes topics come up that may make the parent feel uneasy. These are exactly the difficult topics that the parents need to talk about with their children. I let the players draw an emotional graph to see and discuss how they felt while playing the game. I used their emotional response to modify and create new prompts for the game.

Sabine Brunner who is the other psychologist I worked with said that «It's also important to include the children's view about their parents.». As a result I included questions that make the parents understand how the children see their parents.

Based on the experience of the first testing sessions I realized that a game session can take up to two hours, which is good. However it can be difficult for the parents to remember everything that was said during the game. Therefore I decided to include a recording function. By replacing the cubic dice with a digital one, the game always knows what field the current player is on and can record if it's a relevant communicational field.

In the next iteration I designed reflection cards to guide the parents' reflection when they are listening to the audio recording of the game session.

After noticing that some of the children left the game a bit daunted when they were talking about negative feelings and emotions before the game ended, I decided to give the recording functionality another purpose. I made use of it to allow the child to leave the game with a positive feeling instead. When the first player reaches the goal, the game ends and that player pushes the goal button. This starts a playback of the things that were recorded while the players were on fields with questions about positive topics. Hearing these positive words again as the game ends should remind the children of them and should get them back to a positive emotional state if needed.

In some test sessions it became clear that the game logic had an existential flaw. Because the children would win the game by getting to the goal first, they were discouraged if could see that they've fallen behind. As a result they would cease to engage in the game.

I reached out to a game designer to help me find a solution. We came up with the idea of winning the game by collecting tokens. Collecting objects throughout the game allows for a more subtle competition.

This completely flipped the game logic. Kids now wanted to get to the goal as slowly as possible so they can collect more tokens which leads to more conversations.

In the following iteration of Animo I included a scoring scheme. The more difficult fields get them two tokens instead of one which encourages them to express themselves more deeply about the given topic.

The idea is that Animo is played repeatedly every couple of weeks. In order for this to work, the children need to be motivated to do so. During the research phase I heard and witnessed many times that to make children connected to an object you have to let them take ownership over it. Thus for Animo I designed a personal token that allows the child to start and unlock the game. They can keep the token with them and use it as a night light or keychain if they wish.

Process

Animo was carried out over ten weeks. During 14 interviews with parents who live together, separated parents, grown ups with divorced parents, split family children and day care givers I conducted insights that allowed me to uncover the problems and needs of these people. After defining a design challenge I ran brainstorming sessions with my peers to explore the problem space. Co-creation sessions with children and their parents helped me to narrow down possible design solution which I then prototyped. After prototyping different solutions I decided to pursue the board game. After another 7 iterations of prototyping and testing with 20 different children, 5 families and 3 schools, I ended up with the current version of Animo.

Technology

Animo is powered by a Raspberry Pi 3, audio components, buttons and LEDs. A Python application controls the LEDs and reads the button states. It records speech whenever the LED dice lights up in orange or yellow and cuts off the silent parts.