Mysterious Jar and Emotion

A tool to help parents to draw attention of children to have fruitful conversations during face time.

Function

A tool to help parents to draw attention of children to have fruitful conversations during face time.

Benefits

Grab the children’s attention, facilitate their conversations, Parents having a chance to educate their children through chosen topics and questions, parents will learn more about their children through children’s answers. Through the conversation, the parents can also learn about their children emotional responses related to the topic.

Advantage

Adaptable; parents can add more topics that interest them and their children because they know better about themselves.

Material used : Reused snack glass jar, a ribbon, some paper flowers, A4 papers, color pencils and pen.

Technical skill : Graphic design

Primary users : Parents who live away from their children

Secondary users : Children (age range 3-7 years) who are living away from their parents.

Assumptions

Children will get excited by answering those questions and excited to see the next topic or question. Parents have good communication skills to facilitate a fruitful conversation.

Limitation

Place and time ( if it is at work) of face time could constrain their potential to pay full attention for this, internet connection would be one limitation during their face time, carrying around that jar to working place (if they make face time during working hours) might be inconvenient for them.

Manual on how to use it

The parents are supposed to show the jar to the children to grab their attention and stimulate the curiosity on what is inside the jar.

Then the parent will take out one role of paper from the jar; unroll it and show the picture on the paper. The picture on the paper indicates a topic to talk about on that day.

The relevant questions on the other page will potentially guide the parent on what kind of questions can she ask and what kind of lessons can they teach relating to the topic.

Inspiration

In our group, all of us have encountered with migrant workers in our lives and we also currently have some connection with migrant workers around us. So we decided to study about migrant workers.

We have witnessed that they have to leave their children at their home while they are coming to work here in Thailand. We assumed that there might be some issued between parents and children who were living separately.Therefore, we decided to study about Communication between migrant parents and their children who are currently living separately and emotional disconnection between them.

Process

Then we followed Human Centered Design process (as mention in portfolio brief). Each of us went out to study our participants by interviewing and shadowing our participants in our own ways. Then we came back and worked together as a group again on synthesizing, brainstorming and prototyping.

Our design challenged was

“ HMW create a tool that could help facilitate better quality time during parents children face time?”

Brainstorming ideas for the design

Prototype and testing

Prototype testing with the user

"I didn’t catch his emotions. But I noticed something.

Before, I told him like, “I would cry if you don’t talk to me.”

If I say that he would start crying first. But now that I could grab his attention with this and he is also getting more matured, I don’t need to insist him to talk to me anymore. Trying to answer my questions made him forget about the toys that he was playing.

I enjoyed listening to his talking even though some doesn’t make sense to an adult like me."

Conclusion

As we have studied about emotional disconnection between the migrant parents and the children who are living away from them, we tried to offer a tool that could help them reinstall emotional connection between them. The feedback from our user parent showed that we have achieved our goal.