5 Prototypes — Back to Pen & Paper

Over the course of 4 weeks split between Stanford and Keio University of Media and Design, our team went through 5prototypes to find a solution that increases parent-child engagement in the early years.

After interviewing 5 parents from the US, Bangladesh, Indonesia and China, we arrived at our first HMW statement. The problem was parents often don’t know how to ask their children about their day. The usual answers to “how are you” or “how was your day” are simply “fine” or “good,” which yields little to no information.

First HMW statement

#1 prototype — Click to Capture

We gave cameras to children in a daycare and at home to capture photos of their activities, with the hope that parents would look the photos and have better starting points for a more meaningful conversation.

#1 prototype

Photos taken by the child at daycare

Five key learnings from this prototype:

1. Children lack the attention span to keep track of their activities day after day
2. Children lack the foresight to document their day for the purpose of sharing it
3. Privacy concerns from parents and teachers regarding taking photographs in classrooms
4. Concerns about encouraging the snapchat and instagram posting frenzy at an early age
5. Solving a parent’s problem by making the children do the work

#2 prototype — Create Stories with Chips

The next steps in our project were carried out in Japan at Keio University of Media and Design in Hiyoshi, Japan.

We broadened our HMW statement by continuing to focus on the back-and-forth dialogue between parents and children but extending beyond the scenario of asking about the child’s day. Through journey mapping the parent and child’s activities throughout the day both in the US and Japan, we discovered storytelling to be the common thread.

Comparison of American and Japanese family routines. (Based on diagram from the Good Night News team).

The most common forms of storytelling are parents reading books to the child at night or the child reading on his/her own. In both scenarios, there is a lack of dialogue. This led us to our second HMW statement.

Second HMW Statement

We printed out different background scenes and made a set of magnetic chips with animals, activities, and objects that children could recognize. Along with a magnetic white board, we brought the prototype to a family festival on the weekend.

#2 prototype

3 yr old Taichi invited tambourine & Thomas the train into the storyboard and caused a derail from the story

Key Learnings about the Child:

1. Loves to play with magnetic characters/objective/actions
2. More comfortable creating story after parents chose characters

Key Learning about the Parent:

1. Hesitant to make up story & scared to come up with “bad” story
2. Want a way to “end” the story when they want to move on

#3 prototype — Mad Lib & Chance Cards

The focus of our third prototype is on providing the right amount of structure to facilitate storytelling, particularly to help parents get unstuck.

#3 prototype with mad lib

Key learnings from the mad lib:

1. The interaction between the parent and the child is mostly a one-way Q&A where the parent reads and asks the child to choose the chips
2. Both parent and child are overwhelmed by choice & confused by the different categories of chips.

“My daughter keeps asking me why we are making this story. The purpose needs to be very clear” — mother of 6-yr-old

#3 prototype with chance cards

Key learnings from the chance cards:

1. There were lots of long pauses when the parent and the child got stuck
2. Don’t know how to start or end the stories

“I don’t know anything about the characters. If they were Pokemons, I would know what abilities they have and make better stories” — father of 6-yr-old

#4 prototype — Characters with Backstory

Prototype 3 testing gave us ideas for how to move forward. We knew that we needed to motivate turn-taking and make the characters familiar. We decided to create character cards with short descriptions on the back.

Character card with backstory

Key learnings:

1. Parents struggle to create a story based on the character’s limited backstory
2. Children struggle to understand the reason for creating a story from an unfamiliar character

#5 prototype — Pen & Paper

We brainstormed on options for how we could create characters with stronger backstory for both parents to feel comfortable and children to feel more familiar. We considered using popular anime and cartoon characters, but we did not want to limit the options since families watch different shows. In the end, we realized that there is always a character that the parent and the child know about each night — the star of the story they read together! Therefore, we created a movable piece of paper in the shape of the main character, in a storybook about a blue elephant, and provided an extension packet of white paper.

Now parents and children could feel equipped and empowered to give wings to their imagination.

Feier, Thomas, Yuxi, Diandra (from Left to Right)