By Jacobse, C.L.M.

This project is focused on the joy of early parenthood in contrast with the daily hassles young parents deal with when raising their infant(s). The daily interactions between these two groups and the positive impact design can have on the subjective well-being of the users, will be the starting point of this assignment.

The involved company in this project is ‘Spuni’. This young and small design company, located in New York, aims to become a superior consumer product company on all aspects of developmental growth stages of children between zero and three years old. According to ‘Spuni’, inefficient and poorly designed baby products are one of the activators of the negative experienced emotions among early parents. This creates an interesting proposition to design for; products should have the opposite effect and be used to increase the happiness of early parents and their infants instead of diminishing it. Together with Spuni and DIOPD the following project goal was formulated: ‘Design a product that contributes to the subjective well-being of early parents and their infants by initiating a meaningful experience in the context of daily parenthood.’
Within the analysis phase of this project, the context of early parenthood on a daily basis will be explored to create an overview of (un)pleasant parent-child interactions to design for. From that point, one specific parent-child interaction or activity shall be selected as a basis for the ideation phase.

The image below provides a preview of the results gained from an explorative research with early parents, interviews with experts on the development stages of infants and observation studies on young children.

 

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