2 Week Project
Umeå Institute of Design: Sound Design Course 2019 Team: Zena Corda, Sonya Swan, Tim Schwarz Mentors: UID teachers, Andreas Estensen
My Role
Ideation, Interviews, User Testing, Interaction Design, Conceptualisation, Model building, Sound Choice and Sound Design (Adobe Audition), Storytelling, Film Making (Premiere)
News
This project recently got awarded with the iF Design Talent Award 2019.
How can we create a screen free bedtime experience, that helps children unwind, relax and fall asleep?
The Challenge
Digital technology often has a bad influence on children’s lives, it can affect their social interaction and makes it hard for them, to unwind and relax after a long day, before heading to bed. Research shows that the best way to comfort a child is to spend time with them, listen and build daily routines.
Our Vision
Our vision was to create a screen free bedtime experience, where parents give their full attention to their child and together create a new bed time routine, creating stories through sounds in a relaxing way.
By providing as little restrictions as possible, we tried to fully support the child’s self-expression and creativity to help them process all days impressions and experiences in their very own way.
The Final Result
The product Sound Stories is a storytelling tool, that can be used by children and their parents to bond with, before going to bed. It can cater as inspiration to create spontaneous and imaginative stories as a daily bedtime routine. Sound Stories enhances the experience of storytelling, while supporting children to refocus, unwind and relax before falling asleep.
The Feeling of Togetherness
A lot of parents work full-time and their children spend all day at Kindergarten or daycare. Therefore the evening time is very important to finally have the feeling of togetherness to balance out the time apart and bond. Both children and parents collect a lot of impressions throughout the day and possibly spend a lot of time with digital technology, which both can make them over-excited. Research has shown that a proven method to calm down and relax is to spend some quality time together with the family and listen to each other.
Together processing the day by sharing memories and listening to each other is a meaningful activity to help children grow and create stronger family bonds. Sound Stories supports this activity by catering as a tool that can be used, to create a story while sitting in bed together, while reflection on the days events.
A Moment of Importance
After spending time apart it is essential that a child feels how important it is when finally being back home together with their parents. It is key for them to have room to share what happened during the day and be heard. Sound Stories lets the child be in the center of attention by letting them be an active participant in building their own little magical world, with all the characters and activities they decide to choose on the story cubes.
An Opportunity to Unwind, Refocus and Relax
The goal of a bedtime story is to capture the child's attention, but have them drift off into a dreamland at the end of it. Sound Stories is a calm experience using relaxing ambient nature sounds in the background and very subtle, abstract sounds for its characters and activities. This not only leaves room for more imagination but also prevents from more distraction and over excitement.
At the end of every story the parent has the opportunity to activate a timer, which blends out all the other sounds and only leaves the background nature sound fading out as the child falls asleep.
Creating a Story
To create a good story tool we looked at bedtime stories and broke them down into their elements. We discovered that every good story takes place in an environment that helps create the basis of the new imaginative world. Secondly every story has one or more characters, who are doing some kind of activity, which often include objects. These 4 categories were therefore our basis for every story, without creating any major limitations to creativity but providing some guidance to both parents and children.
Step by Step
Step 1 Turn the dial on the left to choose an environment
Step 2 - Pick any cube of your choice and either turn or dice it to pick either a character, activity or object depending on which cube you’re holding.
Step 3 - Place the cube in one of the three holes with your choice facing up, to add the sound to your environment
Step 4 - Repeat that with all three cubes until your story is complete
Note: Feel free to take out and turn cubes during the story to add more variety as the plot line evolves.
Product Interactions
By switching on Sound Stories we wanted to create and play a first magic sound that support the entry into a new magical world, where the users imagination can go wild.
Once Sound Stories is turned on one can start by turning the dial to set an environment as a base for the story. The user can choose from various nature sounds like rain, a fire place, meadows etc. to set an ambience that can further inspire.
Once the environment is set Sound stories provides three different cubes that can be placed into the empty slots. Once placing the cue you hear the sound of either the character, object or activity you have picked. Tapping the placed cube at any given moment during the story can momentarily make the sound appear louder again to make the story more dynamic.
Nature sounds are known to calm the mind, help you unwind and relax. Once the story comes to an end and it is time to sleep the parent can place Sound Story on the night stand, press the timer button, which activates a 30 min timer. Setting the timer also means, that the cube sounds will slowly fade out and only the nature ambient sound keeps playing on a low volume to help the child fall asleep and maybe even dream further about the story.
Watch the movie and dive into the Bed time experience
Future Outlook
With Sound Stories we tried to create a gender neutral bedtime experience that wasn’t based on stereotypical topics that “only boy” or “only girls” talk about. We tired to choose sounds that anyone can in some way relate to, children as well as the parents.
A possible future scenario could be that further cubes are available for purchase based on the families interest and lifestyle. It would have to be further tested if the desire to customise Sound Stories from the very start and/or have the choice to buy additional cubes to provide more variety in the storyline.
Behind the Scenes
Concept Development
Since this was a very short and only a two week course in which we wanted to develop a full project including shooting the final concept movie we barely had time to go very much into depth with our research. We started with the thought and problem of restlessness before sleeping and wanting to create a calm experience to finish off the day to unwind and relax before sleeping. Inspired by mindfulness, the sounds of nature and a questionnaire that we sent out to over 30 parents, we found out that the most common routine as we remember it ourselves from our childhood is still to read or create bedtime stories in the evening. Since a lot of the parents are part- or full-time at work and the children at daycare it was also very important for us to use the evening back at home to also strengthen the parent-child bond when approaching this project.
Research, Questionnaire
Due to little time we did a lot of online research, talked to parents in our close environment, friends, family as well as sent out a questionnaire to them, to get more insights on what they do or did together with their children to help them unwind and relax. Questions we asked them were: What kind of betimes rituals do you have? Do you ever use sounds, if yes what kind? And what are your children’s most talked about topics? and many more…
Over 80% of the questioned parents tell their kids bedtime stories every night
Prototyping and User testing
During our user testing we got a lot of approval from parents mentioning that their main bedtime ritual was indeed the use of (audio) books or made up bedtime stories, which gave us more assurance that we were going in the right direction with our concept Sound Stories.
The main insights we gained from the user testing with different prototypes, were that people wanted something that had as few parts as possible so that nothing would get misplaced. They liked a linear approach of telling stories as it also guided them through the process of creating a story. And finally and interesting to see was that there were some users, who immediately diced the cubes to be challenged to tell a story with the diced elements and others held the cubes to actively choose their own element.
The Atmosphere we wanted to create
We envisioned Sound Stories to help create an atmosphere where you together with your parents travel into another imaginary magic world for a moments. We wanted to create a moment of togetherness, warmth and comfort while interacting with it and sitting on the bed with the parent look back at what happened during the day or what the sounds and cubes inspire to create in that very moment.
Choosing the Sounds
When choosing the actual sounds, that Sound Stories would play, we tried to remember the goal of a bedtime story. You want the story to capture the child's attention, but you also want to have the child drift into dreamland at the end of it. We spend a lot of time to carefully choose subtle sounds and arrange them in Audition in a way that even if they appeared in a loop would sound natural and not annoyingly repetitive. Also the volume of each sound had to be chosen in a way that it went well together especially when we started to layer multiple sounds, that were playing at the same time.
Making the Model, choosing Colours and creating a Logo
Finally we went into building the model and choosing colours, that we felt went with our concept of unwinding and supporting a good night of sleep. For the Logo we played with the same colours as we used for the cubes and chose a very round and soft font.
A small reflection and what I have learned
During the sound design course I have learned the potential of great results in little time. We only had two weeks for this projects, learned how to take fast decisions, split up tasks amongst the team members as well as trust in others decisions and build on top of them. This course couldn’t have worked without a well structured time plan, setting clear goals as well as priorities and keep going back to them. It was important to strictly put aside our assumptions and biases by carefully evaluating the outcomes of our user testing and actually working with the users opinion.
