Our last project in Design Studio invited us to explore discursive design, speculative design and design futures.  

Having grown up in the cloud forest of Costa Rica, I have been exposed to the ethic and work of conservation from a young age.  As a Quaker, the pillar of Stewardship has always spoken to me.  

As such, the issue I decided to explore by way of this project was conservation and the destruction of the natural world that has come with development and ‘advancement’.  

Below I will outline the problem and the potential solution I explored:

The Problem: 

Coral is being destroyed. About 1/5th of the world’s coral reefs have already been lost or severely damaged.  Another 35% could be lost within 10-40 years.  Coral reefs have survived tens of thousands of years of natural change but many of them may not be able to survive the havoc brought by human kind.  This is a problem because coral provides many services to the ecosystems it inhabits and is crucial for the health of the planet’s oceans. 

Why is coral being destroyed? There are many reasons such as the use of fertilizers and certain chemicals that run off into the ocean, rising water temperatures as a result of global warming and careless tourism. But I wanted to design to a more fundamental issue: empathy.  As designers we often talk about the empathy that is required for us to understand the user, but I wanted to flip this and design a product to engender empathy in the user.  

In my mind, one of the most important factors contributing to the degradation of the natural world, and especially coral, is our lack of empathy for other living things.  Simply put, people don’t view coral as a living creature.  Empathy with the planet and the beings that inhabit it are a big barrier to conservation and appropriate preservation of the natural world.

The Solution: 

Broadly, people need to relate more to coral.  How to achieve this? Having done the projects with kids at the beginning of class, I was already in the frame of mind of working with kids and designing for them.  My solution was to create a plush toy that resembles a caricature of a coral that can say prerecorded messages.  By allowing children to engage with coral at a formative stage in a way that makes it more familiar and perceived as biotic, my hope is that children will be more amenable to changing behaviors later on in life that will help prevent coral destruction and other environmental degradation. Additionally, it is possible that parents would change behaviors in response to this product and the information I envision accompanying it in the branding and packaging.

The Process:

I began by cutting out a cardboard outline of the coral and using that as a template for making the plush toy.  

Using this template, I cut out two identical pieces of coral pink felt.  I then sewed these pieces together and flipped the whole thing inside out so that the seams would be inside the toy.  

In my second iteration, I decided to add a zipper to ease the insertion of the arduino, speaker and battery pack.  This zipper was added by cutting a slit in the felt and sewing the zipper on from the inside.  This was definitely the most technically difficult part of the sewing process.

After completing the shell for the animal, I had to deal with the most challenging part of the project: setting up the arduino such that it would respond to input from two force sensors by playing pre-recorded .wav files from a micro SD card.  I spent a lot of time in the Human Centered Robotics Initiative in the Sci Li and luckily got some help from one of the work-study students there.  

The first step was to connect the waveshield I ordered from adafruit to the arduino--the easy part.  Then I soldered the speaker wires and the force sensor wires into their appropriate ports.  This was my first time soldering, so it was a bunch of fun!  Once all the hardware seemed to be working, I had to begin coding.  This part was tough and I faced a couple of road blocks, but eventually got it working.

Here’s a sample screenshot of the code:

I then created a storage box for the Arduino component and housed it within the coral skin I had made.  After putting the Arduino, speaker and battery components within the skin, I stuffed the whole thing with pillow stuffing material bought from Lorraine’s.

After the product itself was up and running, the next step was to create a video to demonstrate its use.  The video is below:

I first made a gif using Adobe Illustrator.  Using a tablet, I drew each letter and took a screen shot, then made an animation using Illustrator and exported it as a .gif.  This is the intro to the film.  

With the help of my friend Lou, I demonstrated a potential scene in which Lou is in bed with Coraline and it is clear that he is attached to his friend.  

In the video, you can see some of the things Coraline says: “I help keep the ocean clean and safe!”, “Save me!” and “I am the home for many species of fish.” Coraline also says, “A healthy coral means a healthy ocean which means a healthy planet” and “I’m a sensitive creature!”.  

Here are individual videos of the different things Coraline says:

Some of the inspiration for Coraline the Coral came from a project called Jerry the Bear. https://www.jerrythebear.com/

When we set out to create Jerry the Bear we started with a simple question, “How can we improve the lives of children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes?” This set us out on a path of discovery, and we began talking to as many families as we could find! We asked a lot of questions, beginning with what it was like when their child was first diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and how their family began to adjust to the new changes that diabetes brings.

We found a common theme among many families. Children would treat their stuffed animals as if they had diabetes too. Kids would prick their teddy’s fingers, practice giving them insulin injections, and sometimes even draw insulin pumps and glucometers on pieces of paper to take care of their stuffed buddies.  We discovered that children did this to feel less alone. When they’re first diagnosed, most kids don’t know other kids with diabetes. They don’t have peers that they can talk to and relate to, so these stuffed animals become their companions. This insight is what gave us the idea for Jerry the Bear.

So what does it mean for a teddy bear to create empathy?

Before I answer this question, let me give a brief overview of the problem. Children are most often diagnosed with type 1 diabetes between 3 and 7 years old. At this age, they cannot yet manage most of their own medical procedures, leaving them feeling like pincushions - entirely passive when receiving treatment.  Oftentimes children don’t have any friends with type 1 diabetes, adding to feelings of fear and isolation.

Enter Jerry.

Jerry the Bear is a friend for these kids. He helps them cope emotionally with their diagnosis while building the skills needed for self care. As children learn to take care of Jerry’s diabetes, they learn how to take care of themselves. When children take care of Jerry, they experience “symptomatic boundary conditions” (when Jerry is either hypoglycemic or hyperglycemic) in a safe, simulated environment. By exposing children to these real life scenarios with Jerry, they begin to learn critical skills of symptom identification at an early age. After all, children naturally learn by doing, trying, failing, and adapting. Jerry provides a safe way to learn by experimenting and making mistakes that could otherwise be life threatening.

Kids relate to Jerry as a companion and feel personally responsible for his emotional and physical well being, a feeling unique among their dolls or other plush playthings. Jerry enables children to understand that their parents are only injecting and pricking them because they love them, just as children love Jerry. This creates a circle of empathy within families, involving children in their own care process.

The bond between a child and Jerry is important because it enables continued engagement, and thus continued learning. As a child plays with Jerry, they progress through a diabetes curriculum - picking up skills that range from carb counting to monitoring blood glucose levels.

Jerry’s diaries are critical to learning because it shifts the goal of the game from understanding diabetes, to winning the All Star Game. This might not seem like a big deal, but from a child’s point of view it is hugely impactful. Since learning about chronic disease management at a young age isn’t exactly the “coolest” thing to do, the aim of training for a competition ascribes an exciting purpose to this type of education. From a kids perspective, instead of needing to learn about carb counting to progress to the next level, they must meet up with Jerry’s friend the beaver to master archery!

We shipped our first production run of bears last Christmas and are thrilled to have reached 2% of kids diagnosed last year. Even more exciting is that 8 months later, families are still playing with Jerry for over an hour each week. This is quite powerful when put in the context with past research on gaming and diabetes. In 1995, a clinical study was conducted on a video game for children with type 1 diabetes called “Packy and Marlon.” The study took place over 6 months while children logged a total of 34 hours of play. This 34 hours of play reduced emergency hospital visits by 77% - equating to two less visits per year!

As we continue to develop Jerry’s content, we are eager to quantify how he can improve medical outcomes. But right now, to make Jerry the best experience possible, we are focused on the most important thing of all - our users.

To help us get a bear to each and every child diagnosed next year check out our crowdfunding campaign!