Developing countries in Southeast Asia and China experienced rapid urbanization which resulted in a large population of left-behind children, where parents work away from home trying to provide a better living for their families. As the number of left-behind children increase, research has shown a significant impact on their physical and mental health due to a lack of parents supervision and support, for example potential personality distortion, psychological instability, moral misconduct, uncontrollable behavior, and even criminal tendencies.
A common and effective way of communication utilized in both kindergarten and counseling sessions for adults is to communicate through drawing. We considered this mode to be perfect for the communication between left-behind children and working parents because it's often hard for parents to find common topics during phone calls, and hard for children to open up to people who they don't live with everyday.
We want to create a product that children can draw on and send the image to parents' phones for them to respond.
Looking at other drawing boards on the market, our product need to have the following functions and parts:
1. A physical drawing pen instead of a drawing with finger, more comfortable.
2. An area large enough for drawing.
3. Two buttons - one for sending the drawn picture to parents' phone, one for erasing.
*4.Possibly a tray to hold printed responses from the parents.
In many Asian cultures, moon is a symbol that has deep connotation and associations with the reunion of a family. Poetry from centuries ago shines the romantic lights on the symbol of the moon.
We made numerous sketches to incorporate the form of the moon into the product while keeping the above function requirements in mind.
After ensuring nailing down the design that meets all our requirements, we decided to go with the color purple, as it is more gender-neutral and has association with the night sky.
Coming from a relatively well-off family, I was still put in a foster family in China while my parents focused on work far away in Italy. Although I would be extremely grateful if I had a device like Luna so that I could communicate with my parents and tell them about my day through my drawings, the cost of such a device could be too high for other Chinese families where parents and children live separated.
Another point of concern of Luna is the possibility of parents not being able to respond in time, or not responding at all. After all, not all parents have the ability and energy to look after their children after a long day of work let alone through a remote device. A responsive LED screen can be considered, or even more radically, an AI version of the child's parents can be embedded in the software of such a device, despite the unknown psychological consequences.
Through this project, I collaborated with two of my RISD Industrial Design cohorts: Jenny Du and Carina Lee. We contributed similarly to the conceptualization of such an idea, I was solely responsible for the creation of the packaging, an initial physical rough prototype, and largely of the creation of all the graphics.
