2020
Team: Jena Martin and Andrew Bretnall
Professor: BC Hwang
Savannah College of Art and Design
Winner of the 2020 Red Dot Communication Design Award
Public environments like theme parks are typically not accommodating to those with sensory issues (commonly seen in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Sensory Processing Disorder.) This can lead to individuals using situation avoidance as a coping mechanism, therefore missing out on social learning opportunities.
We created the Halcyon Sensory Spaceship, a comprehensive, immersive, and controllable sensory experience. The Spaceship puts the user in the captain’s seat; the environment adapts entirely to their sensory needs. After the experience, the user can re-enter the public environment feeling calm and secure.
We followed an intentional design philosophy inspired by Magical Bridge Foundation CEO Olenka Steciw Villarreal. We had the fantastic opportunity to sit down with Olenka and discuss her journey trying to build an inclusive playground for her daughter with Autism. If you (the reader) are currently in the Bay area, I highly recommend visiting the Magical Bridge playgrounds. If you're a designer, I also highly recommend giving Olenka's TED talk a watch. It's twenty minutes of your life well spent.
Intentional Design comes in three stages: learning about your community, designing for everybody, and evaluating and updating your users. However, the most crucial factor of Intentional Design is not designing for people with disabilities but designing with people with disabilities. Olenka taught us the importance of literally giving people with disabilities a seat at the table and sent us forth with some helpful tips to facilitate a workshop with kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
After talking to Olenka, the first leg of our Intentional Design journey was to go into the community and learn from the lives of real people. The Matthew Reardon Center for Autism was gracious enough to open its doors and give us a tour. There, we met thirty kids with ASD, many also experiencing sensory issues, and interviewed their Director of Education/Chief behavioral psychologist. We learned that the chief struggle for kids with ASD and their parents is, by far, going on public outings. At the MRCA, students can learn coping skills to mitigate this, but they only help so much. While wheelchair ramps have made buildings accessible to those with physical disabilities, the public space is not very welcoming to people with cognitive impairments or sensory needs.
“Society could be a bit more welcoming to people with disabilities."
We also learned that sensory issues like the ones seen in kids with Autism play a big factor in the development of social ability. Sensory issues can cause situation avoidance and the individual to “shut down” as a coping mechanism. Being able to communicate that there is a sensory problem is integral to the individual being able to interact with the world around them.
“Over stimulation causes situation avoidance so they miss out on an opportunity to engage with people. It causes them to shut down and put up barriers to the world. That’s why we work on communicating that things are getting to be too much.”
There's a saying that goes, "Once you've met one person with Autism, then you've met one person with Autism." The Autism spectrum is just that: a spectrum. It encompasses a wide range of abilities, symptoms, and coping mechanisms, which makes it a seemingly insurmountable task to design for. The best solutions to help people with Autism are developed individually, case by case.
We asked Olenka how she dealt with this in the development of her park. She recommended that we start with a design-for-one approach and factor in the flexibility to adapt for all. So, we started with one. We'll call him AJ.
Armed with AJ's list of requirements, we dove into low-fidelity prototyping. We constructed a cardboard spaceship at scale to test the ergonomics at scale and walk through the interaction with our users. We handed our users Sharpies to edit the design on the fly. From here, we recognized some major usability issues with the spaceship design, like the lack of wheelchair access and room for the caretaker.
This mid-fidelity prototype is the product of our first ten-week design sprint. The original plan for our second design sprint was to construct the spaceship at full scale and functionality. This full-scale functional prototype would be donated to the Matthew Reardon Center for Autism, a facility we toured during our first round of research, to join their new sensory playground.
I worked with our industrial design/UX wizard, Andrew, to develop construction plans. The spaceship would have been 6x6x6 feet large (just small enough for the pieces to fit in our cars) and feature an array of Arduino-operated lights, sounds, and tactile sensory experiences.
Within days of the completion of the winter quarter, I was told I had 48 hours to pack up my life in Savannah, move out of my dorm, and make the 8-hour drive to go back home and live with my parents. Although my teammates stayed in Savannah, the school's bench room we relied upon to construct the spaceship was shut down along with our plans.
In an attempt to remain positive, we took on a "blue sky" approach to this project. We decided that it was no longer that we didn't get to make the spaceship; it was that we had the opportunity to design without the confines of what fits in a Prius and what electronics we could afford on three students' salaries.
The choice to go digital was a hard but necessary one. It is important to note that although an entirely VR experience was within our scope, we didn't want to lose the impact that only a physical space can provide. The digital experience comes in three parts: a 3D model of what the spaceship might look like, a clickable prototype for the touchscreen interface, and a VR rendering of the spaceship's environment.
The Halcyon Sensory Spaceship carries a message of radical accessibility with a dash of speculative design (my personal favorite kind of design). By occupying such a large footprint, the Spaceship encourages the businesses who buy in to adopt this message. It gets people talking about Sensory Issues and how we can make the world better for everybody.
Lights with adjustable color and brightness are paired with a simple projector to create gentle visual stimulation and adapt the environment. Lights and symbols also provide visual feedback.
Intuitive touch controls and multi-textured objects give the user tactile feedback and the option to stim and fidget with objects in the space.
A one-sided voice output delivers instructions to the user and creates a human presence in the room. The user isn’t required to speak back to the interface as some users are nonverbal.
The primary role of a stewardess is to keep passengers safe. They do so by delivering instructions in a calm, clear manner and remaining composed in times of duress. The stewardess is trained on every possible situation and can be relied upon in any circumstance.
Key Adjectives
Calm
Matter-of-fact
Clear and concise
Warm
Motherly
Stern but not serious
(we were heavily influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey for the stewardess as well as the overall vibe of the project)
I love big charts! This one is a hybrid user flow and dialogue flow, a Frankenstein solution that arose from the one-sided voice output. The user is given a visual and voice prompt from the stewardess, responds with a button press, and then those responses affect future visual/voice prompts.
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