With this project I wanted to do something with the healthcare sector. This is a very broad topic wath a lot of areas that could use some improvement.
Within the healthcare topic, I really wanted to do something with children. I really like working with children and I think they deserve a better and easier way to interact with healthcare products. A lot of products are not adapted to be used by children. These products look scary and the children often don't understand what is it for or why and how they have to use it.
In the pictures above you can see some products that inspired me to start this project. Especially the product on the left inspired me. The top picture on the left shows a regular EEG monitoring device, below it is a picture of a child friendly adaptation by PilliPilli.
After doing some more research I discovered there is a whole range of special toys, designed to help children with disabilities and impairment. I had never heard of these before and was really inspired by this discovery.
While I was looking for a niche opportunity witin this design field, I realised something very important that changed the course for this project once again. There are a lot of toys that help children with a disability understand how they should behave, or how to interact with other 'normal' children. But there is not a single toy or tool tat helps children who don't have a disability or impairment, understand kids who do.
The conceptualization of a product or tool, to help kids understand disabilities and impairments, became the new assignment. (Details below)
The conceptualization of a product or tool, to help kids understand disabilities and impairments, became the new assignment. (Details below)
I conceptualized a lot of different products and decided to stick with one of my first idea's (concept above). The idea is fairly simple; I would create different dolls with a specific disability or impairment. To make these dolls more appealing to the children, I decided to give eacht of them a personality and a story. The teacher could introduce the children to the doll and treat it like a real person while reading it's story.
I experimented with different prototypes to determine what shape, size and filling would work best for the dolls. Eventually I decided the dolls would be roughly 40 cm (~15 inches) tall and filled with soft stuffing and plastic beads in the ends of the limbs and the botom of the belly. This gave them a nice weight and made them fun to move around.
In the picture above you can see the finished dolls. The doll on the left is visually impaired, the one in the middle has an artificial leg and the doll of the right has down syndrome. In the pictures below you can see the full dolls.
It was a long process to make each doll. It approximately took 10 to 15 hours per doll. I sewed and stuffed the bodies myself, sewed on the hair and made the clothes and accessoiries. For the faces I used pencils with a high color concentration and fixated the colors on the fabric with a special spray.
It was important to make every doll look a bit different. This way it would be more believeable ther
I made a small example of wat te story could be.
