Art / Fida / Family Archive / Meerkat / Tuba / TellTable / Other Brother / SketchStorm / Autonomous Presence
Fida is a master project I worked on in the context of the Microsoft Research Design Expo, which had a 'Health and Wellness’ theme during the summer of 2007. Taking mental health and well-being as a starting point, it was the intention to focus on the mental well-being of children whose parents are divorced. Especially 9 to 12 year old children in this situation find it difficult to express their emotional problems towards their parents. Fida is a product design concept for children that helps lowering the barrier to confide emotions.
Key in the success of this project was the user approach undertaken with several different professional caregivers and two workshops with children at a primary school. These sessions made it possible to distil key design directions and goals which through an iterative design process of various prototypes led to the design of Fida.
Fida is a small sphere that allows a child to capture emotionally intense moments and confide emotions indirectly to the parent. The emotional message takes the form of a spoken message, a colour, a personal note or a combination of the three, leaving more freedom in emotional expression for the child. It can be left in various places such as under a pillow or in a parent’s coat. Functioning as a communication trigger, Fida brings back direct and personal communication. Although the design process is very much focused on children experiencing their parents’ divorce, Fida ultimately provides a platform to trigger intimate communication in both positive and negative situations.
For an overview of how Fida works you can have a look at the video here.
