Tooth Fairy

Description

Generation Alpha are those who are born between 2010 and 2024. As digital natives, they are the first generation to be raised in a fully digitalized world. Therefore, it is almost impossible to dissociate them with technology. With this in mind, how can technology and design help children to build positive and healthy habits? Tooth Fairy is a helpful friend to guide children with brushing their teeth.

Design Process

Within psychology, habits are defined as actions that are triggered in response to contextual cues that have been associated with their performance. So for example, putting on a seatbelt (action) after getting into car (contextual cue). According to the habit formation theory, repetition of a simple action in a consistent context leads to the action being activated upon the contextual cues habitually. Once this action is transferred to external cues, dependence on motivational processes is reduced. Therefore, habits are likely to persist even after conscious attention dissipates. With this habit loop in mind, I wanted to encourage children to build a healthy habit of brushing their teeth. And through this process, children would feel emotions such as satisfaction, joy and pride. For my physical prototype, I quickly executed a form with bubble wrap and led strips to communicate my idea. This would be a device that lives in a child’s play room or bedroom, and become the child’s friend. It communicates through different colored lights and facial expressions to remind the child when to brush their teeth. For example, when it’s time to brush, it would display an unhappy face and blink red, or when it’s done brushing, it would shine white. From here I made some more refinements in form and made digital renderings of how I envision them if I had the appropriate resources to make it. So the object, depending on its situation, expresses different emotions. In this way, it not only communicates to the child when to brush their teeth through how it feels, but also builds a closer relationship and empathy with the object. And by taking care of the object or friend, the child would also be taking care of him/herself. Although I was unable to make the object, it was still important for user testing so I created a sketch to imitate the experience. So there are 6 different emotions or modes. There’s a time feature, brush is when you’re brushing your teeth you can sing along with it, elated is when you’re done brushing your teeth, Happy is when you don’t have to brush your teeth yet, worried is when it is time to brush your teeth and upset is when it’s past time to brush your teeth. The buttons here all are for presentation purposes but the version that I gave to the family I was testing with, it was set so that at 8:20 it would be worried, and if the teeth still wasn’t brushed, it would then at 8:25 be upset, until the brush button was pressed. So the emotions were tied into time so that the interaction happened less with interacting with the screen. For about a week and a half of testing, I got observations from the parents that the children named it Hoya, and found eye and mouth interaction to be human-like and friend-like. The sounds triggered action, so the uncomfortable noises when its unhappy motivated them to brush their teeth, and wanted to take care of the character. Parents also mentioned that children wanted to hold and touch the screen, so a physical object with some mass would be more helpful and convincing. And moving forward I think user experience is important- right now it’s something new but if this continues over weeks and months- I’ll have to figure out how will the interaction have to change? I think it’s an on going work in progress but as of now this is where I’ve landed.

Reflection

I tried to create a digital version of the Tooth Fairy in order to illustrate the experience I wanted to portray. However, I think it was mostly focused on the interaction with the child, rather than the caregiver. Considering that this object is used by very young children, it is most likely that the caregiver still helps the child to wake up in the morning and carry out daily activities. Therefore, it is key that the caregivers are considered in the design of the object, which the Tooth Fairy currently lacks. I should have considered how the caregiver interacts with the object before it blinks any indication as well as after the activity. It is also the caregiver who decides to use the device or not, so rather than soley designing from the perspective of the child, it is important to include the parent or guardian, perhaps them as the main audience to create a more holistic design. I think this is just the first stage to a long process, but it was worthy to understand the improvements that can be made to further develop this object.