Travel is always fun and exciting? Well, not so true for children with Autism. We explored how technology can be used to help them enjoy family trip.
Product Design, Design for Children, Accessibility, Touchscreen, Imagine Cup Competition
For the 30-hour final round of the Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition in Design, we were challenged to design solutions that help children with Aspergers’ Syndrome(AS) to have fun and enriching family trip to a foreign country. The short time and open-endedness of the problem challenged us to understand the special needs & characteristics of children with AS, and narrow down to a reasonable scaled solution that addresses the problem in a short time.
We have a specific yet not familiar user group. So we started by understanding AS symptoms and the special needs of children with AS better through secondary research. Aside from helping them cope with travel difficulties, we also want to facilitate a learning experience. We thought that observing new surroundings while travelling to a foreign country by itself is an enriching learning experience. However, children with AS would draw themselves away from unfamiliar things. We would like to support and encourage children with AS to observe unfamiliar environments in a less anxious way while traveling.
Through sketches, we explored a wide range of concepts, and got to the idea of providing incentives for children with AS to take pictures of new environment, and the pictures would also be utilized to help them deal with travel and communication difficulties. The idea evolved into the final design of a children camera, Puzzleye, that helps the child to cope with his fear of crowds, long flight, and overwhelming new environment, with the purpose of supporting and encouraging him to observe the new surroundings. Having the companion of Puzzleye, we hope the children with AS will better enjoy the learning experience of looking at the unfamiliar world in travel.
