Melos are building blocks that kids of all visual ability can arrange in space to compose musical melodies. This project began with the goal to help design for playful interactions between children of all visual abilities.
Details
2017 – 2018
My Role
Project Manager
Lead Product Designer
Lead UX Designer
Team
Neuroscience,
Linguistics,
Engineering
students
Tools
3D Printing
Arduino
Problem
How might we promote integration between children of different visual ability through sensory play?
The overarching objective of this project was to build independence for the blind population. Our focus was to increase interaction between visually able and visually impaired children during elementary school age range.
Research
Understanding the Sphere of the Child
We spent time researching, talking to, and observing children, parents, teachers and administrators of Perkins School for the Blind, and members of the National Federation of the Blind to gain a multi-faceted understanding of the world of children with visual impairment. The conversations helped us understand the importance of sensory information in learning.
Part-to-Whole Learning
"Sighted students learn whole to part, blind students learn part to whole." One of the greatest insights we gained through our conversations with educators was that children with visual impairment understand the world primarily through tactile and auditory cues. This meant that if, for example, a plastic bottle was in front of a visually impaired child, they would perceive it as a bottle once they had the chance to physically interact with the different parts of the whole bottle.
Education in Schools
More specifically, we learnt how the specialized curriculums in public and specialized schools contributed to the difficulty in differently visually abled children to connect with one another.
We found out that visually impaired children are required to be enrolled in the existing core curriculum, like other sighted students in their classes. However, they are additionally enrolled in an ECC (Expanded Core Curriculum) program. Exceptions in class assignments are only occasionally made when the task could be physically harmful to the student.
In fact, during our conversation with Danielle, a Teacher of Students with Visual Impairments in Providence Public Schools, we found out that her role is to "level the playing field" by ensuring that her blind students are required to complete the same assignments. She maintains a strong communication channel with her students' teachers, to be notified of the assignments in advance, for her to prepare and reformat (if needed) the assignment for the students' visual ability (ie: raising the lines on a diagram, providing raised texts and appropriate technology).
Understanding Play
Gathering insights to characteristics and qualities of preferred forms of Play in elementary school aged children of different visual abilities was critical in forming our design guideline. Through interviews, observations, and online surveys, we recognized the prevalence of technology-integrated game play, and the importance of interaction with friends and creativity across all forms of play.
Imaginative Play with Friends
An online survey was sent out for children and parents of children to complete in order to understand how they play and interact. We found some overarching themes, including a particular interest in physical activities, imagination and creativity, interaction with friends, and use of tablets, smartphones and video games.
Sensory Stimulation
Our visits to Perkins School for the Blind helped us outline the qualities that made a physical toy popular between their elementary school age group. These qualities included auditory, tactile, and visual (strong color contrasts and light). Our conversations with the students revealed to us that playtime that involved creative creations with friends and family was also very popular.
Design Goals
Months of research led us to identify the need to foster independence and confidence in blind children, including sense of belonging, creative outlets, and tactile play. These insights helped shape our design goals:
Foster Confidence
Promote Interaction
Toy designed equally
Design Concept
We designed modular building blocks that children could use to build musical tunes together. Each block was to carry a musical note. When they were arranged in a row, the notes were to play in sequence, and when they were stacked, they were to play chords. With the basic concept of the play in mind, we went back to Perkins and carried out a Wizard of Oz testing to gather initial feedback.
Initial Observations
We visited Perkins School with the game play concept in mind, and used Wizard of Oz testing method to observe how the children interacted with melodic blocks. We wanted to observe how engaging and curious the kids would be.
Cause and effect is fun!
The kids were surprised and entertained by the notes and chords the blocks made when stacked.
Motor skills are
very important.
The level of dexterity directly factors into the level of interest and engagement of the play.
Keep it simple.
The more complex the play is, the harder it is for the children to understand how to create their own combinations.
Prototyping
Our team spent months experimenting to develop working prototypes. Below are documentations of how Melos developed over time, through technical and design iterations:
User Testing
We visited local public schools in Providence and Boston with our Melos blocks to play with kids of different vision levels, and watched them interact with them. We noticed that regardless of their cognitive ability to understand the dynamics of the blocks, they were entertained by the physical engagement with musical notes.
Final Design
Future Considerations
Based on our observations, testing, and participant feedback, our team would make the following suggestions for future development of Melos:
Tactile Variations
Different textures on the surfaces of the blocks can not only be more stimulating, but also become valuable cues for the notes they carry.
Brighter Lights
Children with Cortical visual impairment (CVI) require high contrast colors and lights. Sighted children were also interested in the blocks lighting up.
Features
For the more advanced users, can we have more intricate features for recording, saving, and remixing the compositions?
Smaller size
The kids were surprised and entertained by the notes and chords the blocks made when stacked.
Charging and Storage
Our team briefly experimented with wireless charging pads as a charging method, but more energy-efficient and convenient storage methods can we investigated.
