This project has been accepted by the 2018 ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference. The Bird House was exhibited in the conference as an art installation. You can check the related paper here. It’s not a perfect scientific paper but it was good that we made the project further than a course assignment.
01 /Overview
Project intro:
This is a group project of my graduate course Design, Creativity and Innovation, which was aimed to promote the mental health for the elderly. After visiting the local elderly center and conducting a series of research, a prototype of an interactive bird house was developed as a solution which is aimed to facilitate and differentiate connection between senior citizens and children. The prototype consists three components, the bird cage, the light board, and the music board. You can have a brief view of the prototype through the following video.
Group member:
Yijie Zhou, Irina Bjerkvold, Sabina Niewiadomska, Andreas Wisle
My role:
User research, concept design, visual design, prototyping
Tools we used:
Arduino, Processing, 3D printing
What I learnt:
Tangible design, arduino, physical prototyping
Duration:
October 2017 — December 2017
02 / Research
To have a better awareness of the situation of the elderly in the elderly center, we visited Brumunddal elderly home, a local elderly home. We were allowed to observe, talk to, and interview residents and staffs there.
Methods:
Interview, observation, literature review
Interview:
Observation:
Literature Review:
Inspired by the observed positive influence of the cross-generation activies in the elderly center, we did a literature review about the correlation of the mental health and the communication between elders and children.
Research shows that that communication of grandchildren with grandparent have a positive influence on grandparents’ mental health [1]. It’s not only elderly who can benefit from relation to older adult, it is also observed that children that have contacts with elderly people will develop a more positive attitude toward adults in general [2]. Other research shows that children who have contact with non-related elders will also more likely open up to grandparents in the future [3]. Emotional closeness to grandparents might help children at risk for poorer social competence [4].
- Mansson, D. Grandparents’ Expressed Affection for Their Grandchildren: Examining The Grandparents’ Own Psychological Health. Communication Research Reports 31, 4 (2014), 329–338.
- Harwood, J., Hewstone, M., Paolini, S. and Voci, A. Grandparent-Grandchild Contact and Attitudes Toward Older Adults: Moderator and Mediator Effects. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31, 3 (2005), 393–406.
- Tam, T., Hewstone, M., Harwood, J., Voci, A. and Kenworthy, J. Intergroup Contact and Grandparent–Grandchild Communication: The Effects of Self-Disclosure on Implicit and Explicit Biases Against Older People. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 9, 3 (2006), 413–429.
- Akhtar, P., Malik, J. and Begeer, S. TheGrandparents’ Influence: Parenting Styles andSocial Competence among Children of Joint Families. Journal of Child and Family Studies 26, 2 (2016), 603–611.
03 / Ideate
Methods:
Card sorting, sketching, storyboarding
Card Sorting:
Based on outcomes from the research, we used card sorting to sort and visualize the problems, opportunities, goals and potential connections between them.
Concluded by the card sorting, our design goal is to create an activity which can encourage contacts between elders and children. Through this activity, elders can have more chance to communicate with their families, especially with their grandchildren. During the cross-generation communication, elders are able to share the experience and knowledge to the younger generation, which can provide the feeling of achievement and confident for them. As the activity is both for elders and children, it should be interesting for both of them. Among all the hobbies we collected from the elderly center, we found the bird sighting can be a good touching point because usually elders are proficient in recognizing the common species of birds and children are interested in nature. Therefore, we came out the idea of an interactive bird house.
Ideate and sketch:
After decided the solution, we started to sketch to diverge the ideas of the bird house. As the current bird house in the elderly center lacks interaction, we wanted to add more activities and make it more engaging.
Our first idea was to make the elders and children can feed the bird themselves. The former bird house is managed by the nurse because it’s dangerous and tiring for elders to change the bird food outside the window.
Inspired by the automatic feeder for dogs and cats, we wanted to design a bird feeder which can be controlled remotely which allows elders to feed the bird while sitting inside the room.
Also, we planed to place a motion sensor inside the bird house, which can send a signal to inform inhabitants when it detects a bird inside the birdhouse. The signal can be a sound or some light effects.
The third idea was to build a chirp bird for the children to play with. It can play different sounds of the common birds, which can be observed in the bird house, by pressing different buttons on it. Elders can explain for childrens what kind of birds are on the chirp board and how to use buttons.
Final conception:
Storyboarding:
04 / Prototype
The bird cage:
The framework of the bird cage was prototyped with reinforced and wrapped cardboards, decorated with branches, which was not only to make the birds feel safe and comfortable but also to create a stand because the structure of their feet is more suitable to grab. The columns of the birdcage were decorated with wool thread, a familiar visual element for the elderly, it also allows them to be able to knit their own decorations to redesign the birdcage. To make the birdhouse attractive to children, we designed a swing in the birdcage and made bird models with paper and wool.
The bird feeder:
The bird feeder was 3D printed and is powered by a stepper motor to deliver the food. It is connected to an Arduino board and controlled by a rotary encored mounted on an easy to grab knob.
The light board:
The light board consists of a frame, LEDs, a light sensor and an Arduino board. The LEDs and the light sensor are controlled by the Arduino board. The light sensor is placed inside the birdhouse and is used as motion sensors so that if a bird approaches, it can detect the change of lightness and turn on the LEDs in the fr ame to inform the residents that there are birds in the birdhouse. The light board was placed in a wooden frame, which fits the whole environment in the elderly center. We used wool to soften the light from the LEDs, to make it less disturbing to the residents.
Music board:
The music board is prototyped with cardboards, plastic covers, printed papers and an Arduino board. There are three big buttons on the music board, which was designed to make it easier for both the elderly and the children to interact with. Each of them represents one bird species (Blue Tit, Sparrow and Bulfinch) which is indicated by the printed image of different birds. When users press the button, the music board will give a light feedback and play the chirp sound of the bird it represents. The music board was design to generate a bond between children and elderly.
First iteration of prototypes:
05 / Feedbacks and future works
After the first stage of prototyping, we presented our project in the Brumunddal elderly care center and during the Desigh Day of NTNU in Gjøvik. We conducted several interviews among nurses, design students and design lecturers and collected user feedbacks which inspired us to make some future iterations of our project.
- Improvement of visual style: Currently the visual style of each component of bird house is not consistent. We plan to conduct a more detailed visual research before next iteration to build a systematic visual identity which is appealing to both children and elderly for our project.
- Improvement of mechanics: The current mechanics of the bird feeder is functional but not friendly to birds. When the stepper motor drives the propeller inside the bird feeder, it makes too much noises which may scare the birds away. For this problem, we plan to select the motor which can make smoother rotation and make a cover of the bird feeder using sound absorbing material.
- Improvement of materials: Since our bird house is a prototype, we used handy materials around us to build it up and did not think too much about attributions of materials. For further iteration, we plan to choose more suitable material to redesign each component, especially components outside the window should be made of a more stable and durable (waterproof and easy to sanitize) material.
