Ilvy: Prenatal Bonding
Problem Definition
A calm and relaxed mental state is one of the crucial factors during pregnancy and fetal development. However, pregnant women tend to feel insecure and stressed. They receive little information about the baby’s well-being or don’t know how to interpret it.
Proposed Solution
“Ilvy” is a medium for a pregnant woman and fathers to develop an emotional bond with their unborn baby by using sound as a language. Whenever the mother places Ilvy on her belly, the baby activity generates a poetic melody to which the mother listens. Heartbeats, movement, hiccups and kicks are monitored to create a unique, artistic and relaxing experience.
Using Ilvy, the mother receives a satisfying response from the baby in the form of sound which has the right balance between a melody and generative art.
The Design Process
The project was a ten-day collaboration with two students from the MFA in Advanced Product Design. The short timespan made the process extremely high paced.
We started looking for potential contexts where sound design could be applied in a meaningful way. We noticed a design opportunity to use the emotional richness of music for pregnant woman.
We continued by thinking on a user experience level. Once we positioned our product purposefully far from medical products, we aimed to design an unobtrusive product that wouldn't distract the mother from the baby.
In terms of interaction this meant we stayed close to a pregnant mother’s natural habits such as talking to the baby and placing the hands on the belly.
Translating the baby’s activity into a human-like, emotional sound, to which the mother would feel connected, was the biggest challenge. Many sound explorations resulted in technological and artificial sounds. Besides that, we tried to avoid sounds that could be associated with a medical device, so that the mother would misinterpret the baby’s wellbeing. We achieved this by finding just the right balance between a melody and generative art.
Role in Team
I worked in a multidisciplinary team, consisting of two interaction designers and two product designers. As one of the two interaction designers, I had a role in envisioning an experience in which our product was unobtrusive, enabling the mother to fully focus on the baby. This vision guided both the interaction and the form of the final product. Besides that it enabled us to execute the project in just ten days.
During the implementation phase I focused on coding and building the interior of the product. With the other interaction designer, we explored different light patterns to support a relaxing experience. In order to remotely control the behavior of the light, we added an infrared sensor to the Arduino. Thanks to this, we did not have to disassemble the product before usage. During this making process we communicated closely with the product designers to ensure the electronics would fit into the final product.
