Therapeutic mood-regulating toy for autistic kids with heightened sensory input.
Following the success of a group project in a psychology and design class, my teammate and I received a social impact grant from Dartmouth’s Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship to explore the potential of our product with other high-sensory autistic kids. We partnered with the DALI Lab and Hartford Autism Regional Program (HARP), which provides educational and clinical services for low-functioning autistic students in elementary through high school. We worked closely with their behavior analysts, occupational therapists and physical therapist to learn about behavioral and psychological tendencies of severely autistic kids, including their affinity for sensory-stimulating toys.
Role: UX/Product Design Lead on DALI Team, External Partner to DALI Lab with Isabelle Parizeau
Tools: AutoDesk Fusion 360, Adobe Illustrator, Laser Cutter
Timeline: April 2019-May 2019
How might we help kids on the Autism spectrum regulate their emotions and behavior using delightful sensory stimulation?
Zones of Regulation
We want to help autistic kids regulate they mood to be in the green zone. Every kid is different in terms of how they might be calmed down, but there is a population of highly-sensory children who can be soothed using strategic sensory stimulation, like Mr. Ryleigh
To stabilize one’s mood, the box had to be…
1. Delightful
for students so that they will engage with the box for a duration of time and learn to actively seek the product when in a unengaged or overly-distressed state of being. We wanted to use delight to help them behavior regulation.
2. Intuitive and easy
for a kid to learn how to remove and attach tiles, but strong enough so that the tiles can be played with without falling off the box.
For example, this gear train tile had to be magnetic enough to stay on the side of the box while someone spins a gear. But it couldn’t be overly-magnetized otherwise it would be too difficult to remove and swap out for another tile.
3. Portable
for students to take home so that they can learn behavior regulation with the box in school and use these skills at home and small enough to fit in your lap. Look at how easy it is to carry!
Refined prototype:
TactTiles is a box with magnetic, detachable tile sides, each with a different texture or dynamic interactive component. Users can choose which textures to attach to the sides based on their mood and store the other tiles inside the box. The tiles are designed to stimulate the user’s tactile and visual senses to create a delightful experience that calmly resets their focus and energy.
The Most Successful Tiles
In one of our interviews with a specialist, we learned that cause and effect relationships are particularly engaging for the autistic population. This led me to create the following dynamic tiles, which prompted the most delight during testing.
Inspired by the glitter wands some of the kids played with at HARP. I designed this tile using Adobe Illustrator. To assemble, I used laser-cut acrylic, water, food coloring, glitter, acrylic cement, chicago screws and silicone.
Many kids with autism love to watch things spin. We created a spin tile of the box using fidget spinners.
The kids delighted in watching the colors change between purple and blue as well as the sensation it generated for their hands.
This mirror-gear train was a second iteration of a wooden gear. The kids loved looking at themselves through the mirror, but on a next iteration I would make the background tile mirrored and the gears opaque colors so that you can see the gears spin more.
At Keene Perspectives, a center for autistic children, many of the kids love to watch the vertical blinds sway back and forth. I used mardi-gras beads and silicone to create a similar action on a smaller scale.
I found this toy at Walmart, stuffed it with diced up foam mattress pad, sealed it with a small circle of acrylic and adhered it to the tile using silicone.