Team: Manali Panchal/ Svaney Shen/ Zhaolu Song
Brief: Design a friendly museum experience for children with ASD.
Time: October
Interactive Sensory Map + Plan Map
Last week, I designed sensory map navigation for parents to make a visiting plan. However, for children with ASD, just choosing a specific area is not a good solution, because it still cannot avoid potential risks. We should focus more on what the families can control rather than the things they can’t. Therefore, I changed the function of the sensory map from guiding children on the spectrum to a specific area to helping them familiarize themselves with the museum environment and prepare psychologically.
Based on the feedback, I redesigned an interactive sensory map for children with ASD to understand the senses in each area. When they place the visual button of a certain area on the sensory map, the relevant sensory stimulus of that area will appear.
Interactive Sensory Map. Design by me.
It will be overwhelming if anything unexpected happens to individuals with ASD, so I also designed a plan map for better preparation. When they feel ok with these stimuli and want to go to this area, they can stick the visual button of this area on the plan map.
Plan Map. Design by me.
Visual Interactive Cards
To make the visual cards more playful for kids, Manali designed several different interactive functions and Svaney made some VR videos for each area So children can have an intuitive feeling of the environment.
Interactive cards and interactive cards. Design by Manali and Svaney.
Making Process. Photo by me.
Feedback & Take away
It was a very fruitful week and most feedback was positive. They think it’s a good idea to design something interactive for preparation, especially the plan map idea. However, there are still some visual parts we need to pay attention to, for example, Greg advised us to unify the visual language to make it more consistent for children and Alastair suggested removing the noise on the map to make it simple.
Besides, Tiffany and Wan had different opinions about the connection between the sensory stimulus designed with that in the real environment. Tiffany thought the connection is weak so they can’t really connect while Wan argued that it is not a problem and she thought the sensory map is just for mental preparation. I understand Tiffany’s concerns, but I think it is difficult or even impossible for us to design the exact same sensory stimulus in the museum. Without user testing, the design is not convincing. We still need to find our target user and test it with them, which is what we will do soon.
Next, we will iterate our prototypes based on the feedback and go to Science Museum to conduct user testing! Very excited now!
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