REACT
An interactive lighting and communication system for displaced children
Role:
Lead Designer
Tools:
OpenSCAD, Fusion 360, Arduino
Timeline:
1 year
Achievements
Most Voted Project, Global Product Development in association with Beihang University, HKUST and Seoul National University
The Problem
This was a project created, designed and researched for in 2018 - when the Rohingya camp in Coxs’ Bazar in Bangladesh was the largest refugee camp in Bangladesh.
This meant a large number of children living in these camps with a lot of physical safety and mental health concerns. This became more prominently visible as we ran a survey speaking to multiple different types of stakeholders across Bangladesh, Hong Kong, South Korea and China to identify the problems that these displaced children face.
Lack of emotional security vs lack of life resources?
The highest percentage of underlying problems that displaced children feel pointed towards the lack of emotional security among children.
This helped us dig deeper and produce a Kano model to understand what we can actually design to help fulfill the primary emotional security needs of children. While doing taht, we got introduced to even deeper problems.
This included simpler things like not having toys to play with - as disheartening it was, it was true and common among most refugee camps in the world.
On a wider note, the respondents to the questionnaire include different countries and regions and different ages and backgrounds. Based on the valid data collected, we analyze our products for children who are homeless, stateless or displaced to respond to the following claims:
It is vital to provide children with a safe place and spiritual support from their families.
Child sexual assault and violence are the greatest threat to displaced children
For displaced children, there should be a basic set of supplies for health.
According to the questionnaire for China, the biggest problem of the integration of displaced children into the new environment, nearly the primary reason of panic comes to be unfamiliar with the surroundings.
This made us want to tackle both the physical and mental security aspect for these children through designing one accessible, child-friendly product.
The Solution
REACT-ing to the needs
Make it stand out
We designed a set of origami toys that:
Children can build
Has SOS lighting features so that they can call for emergency whenever needed
Has educational features of learning how to build something
Is a beautifully designed toy made for aesthetic pleasure in the form of 3D printed animals that they can think of as their own personal pets
Design Journey
We started with ideating product designs for fulfilling each of these needs separately.
But soon we found different issues with each of these designs and they all had multiple subsystems that we thought would make this simple toy much more complicated than intended.
Ultimately, we came up with REACT. Here’s all the features that this product has:
