King Simba

The Product

Our team leveraged a combination of ethnographic inquiry and design research methods to create a hyper-personalized de-stress object for Ricky Holtz. The collaborative design process resulted in a stuffed lion product, which we modified to  further incorporate the personal details we learned from Ricky through our interviews. 

The most striking feature is the face, which we replaced with a mirror. We did this in response to Ricky's testimony stating that his mother gave him a stuffed lion when he was young, which gave him strength and served as a comfort object. When we replace the lion's face with a mirror, we send the message that now that Ricky is an adult grad student, he is experienced and self-reliant enough to be his own source of strength. 

The second feature is the glowing heart of the lion, which incrementally changes from red (negative) to green (positive) as its paws are squeezed. After enough consecutive squeezes, the lion's heart begins to pulse and the sound of "I Just Can't Wait To Be King" (from the Lion King movie) emits from the chest, serving as a reminder of Ricky's future goals. The squeezing process itself acts as a destresser, resembling the squeezing of stress balls. As a whole, these features create a single cohesive destressing experience specific to Ricky's personal history and attributes.

The Interview Process

Interview 1

To break the ice, we played a game one of our team members (Stacey) created called "Destroy, Play, and Toss". Through this, we present Ricky a choice between 3 objects and ask him to decide which one to destroy, which to play with, and which to throw away. 

The first was [ potted plant, stuffed animal, digital camera] 

He decided to destroy the potted plant, play with the stuffed animal, and toss the digital camera.

We asked Ricky to draw himself doing these acts.

This technique, asking him to draw himself in these situations, caused him to think more deeply about the scenario than if we had just asked him to describe it verbally. We found that Ricky was more descriptive and detailed in the first iteration of the game (we asked him to draw) than in the second (we did not have him draw), we believe because drawing himself made it more concrete, and therefore easier to think of more details. 

The second was [drone,hoverboard, secret pen camera]

He decided to toss  the hoverboard, destroy secret pen camera, and play with the drone.

Through the first game is where we learned he had a stuffed lion when he was a child, this was because we probed him with a follow up question when he commented "it depends on what kind of stuffed animal" during the game. Through this technique we were able to draw out deeper details than a normal conversation might cover in such early stages. 

Interview 2

We noticed in the first interview that Ricky was very open, which made it easy to strike conversation about himself and establish a comfortable level of rapport early on. We employed more detailed Deep Dive style questions to get to know him on a more personal level.

We asked Ricky to state which 5 events were most important into getting him to where he is right now, a grad student at the iSchool. 

• Getting online/technology when he was in elementary school

• dropping CS degree in favor of a major he designed

• CS degree would have given him a much narrower focus

• student leadership

• he wasn’t going to apply but saw a video highlighting leadership experience

• ambition

• Make a difference

• MTV out of college - viacom job but didn’t want to change the world that way.

• family support

• mom didn’t know what masters degree is/was

• sister came to visit Berkeley

Here is a consolidated bullet point listing for further detailed we learned from this interview, followed by the structure of the questions we asked.

• When he is stressed

• thinks about it 5 years from now and then understands its true weight

• why does he teach? teaches for the love of teaching, has taught for a while, enjoys engaging with students to help foster growth and knowledge.Questions:

  • Stuff in bag

  • What three things in bag do you use/ would you want to

  • Ask about student who was causing him trouble*

  • Play, Toss, Destroy Game again (same one) with the things that he like

  • how did you get to the ischool => Life mapping, probing for events (can limit to like 5)*

  • Inner motivations => Longterm goal maybe

  • GIve an example of a particular thing that motivated you for a particular event

  • What motivated you to keep teaching despite the stress*

  • When he feels stressed

  • Other things that cause stress

The Design Process

Our design process followed principles established by popular design agencies and schools such as IDEO, Frog Design and leading design universities. We decided to begin this process by first meeting up as a team after we had all watched the interviews to brainstorm possible ideas. We began by first independently writing high-level themes that we extracted from the interview onto sticky notes. This was then followed by a group activity of collaboration and sharing of each of our own ideas. We then began to start grouping our sticky notes into categories - often refereed to as an affinity diagram. Some of the themes that we came up with as a team were: de-stressing, leadership, dance bag, quantified-self, and drawing. 

After we had completed the affinity diagram activity we began to narrow down the ideas via a voting system and then began to ideate on the ideas we liked. After we brainstormed to a point where the team felt that we knew what materials we would like to use we began to sketch the prototype. We applied the same principles from before and all sketched what we thought a few versions of a prototype could look like and then shared them with each other. We soon had a solid idea of what we wanted and proceeded to go buy the materials.

The Video

How To Recreate What We've Done (Instructables Style)

After our design process, we decided the functions of King Simba should include a mirror, buttons, an RGB LED with a heart cover and a speaker. The mirror was to let Ricky see himself in the lion. The buttons were to act as therapeutic devices with haptic feedback. As the buttons were pressed the LED would change from red to green in the heart until a certain number of clicks when the LED would start blinking. At this moment the speaker would begin to play, "I just cant way to be King!" from the Lion King sound track. 

The first step in our process to create an updated Simba lion for Ricky started with picking the right lion stuffed animal. Our next objective was to gather the necessary items that would create the experience we designed, which started with finding a mirror that would fit the lion.

We used the 1820 Voice Record Module to record and play the sound clip, "I just cant want to be King!" The module worked well on its own but we wanted the speaker to play after getting an input from the buttons through the Arduino.

We decided the buttons should be in the paws in order to allow for easy interactions. We extended the wires to run from the breadboard to the paws and began testing the buttons with the LED.

We used several techniques throughout the project to take apart and put together the lion with the new electronics. After testing the sound we realized we need more volume so we used a cut bottle to amplify the sound from the speaker.

In order to fit the electronics in the lion we decided to put them in a box, which would help prevent the wires from shaking loose. 

The final working prototype used a 9V battery with an on/off switch to power the Arduino, LED, and speaker. Red felt dots were added to the paws to help visualize the buttons behind the fur.