01. What's the Goal?
Kindness — and all those other ooey-gooey feelings — can be tricky to model and teach in a museum setting. While the Kindness Gallery at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh aspires to facilitate conversations about kindness, the result is a hodge-podge of different exhibits, not all of which accomplish their goal.
That’s where we came in. Based on our initial research, I was especially curious about how we could encourage learning and experiencing empathy within families. Hard enough just for adults, right?
To guide our exhibit design, we focused on two Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Competencies.
Primary Goal
Social Awareness: Showing understanding and empathy for others.
Secondary Goal
Relationship Skills: Practicing teamwork and collaborative problem-solving.
Empathy was a loaded word, especially for children, so we reframed it to be about care. To guide our exhibit design ideation, we spoke to 12 museum visitors (including both adults and children). This allowed us to better understand how they held conversations about care and collaboration.
Physical Touch
Physical touch or providing physical objects is critical in how children express empathy and care to their adults.
Collaboration
At the Children’s Museum, interaction with other children through collaboration or even taking turns is valued by adults in teaching children about kindness.
Being Grown-Up
Experiences in which children can attempt “grown-up” activities are more novel and inspire more wonder.
Our Goal
02. Ideation
Through our conversations with both museum visitors and expert stakeholders, we generated 20+ ideas and narrowed down to 3 final concepts. Ultimately, we landed on an exhibit experience where children must work together to help a distressed robot feel better — HELP-A-ROBOT!
Why HELP-A-ROBOT? Out of all those ideas, HELP-A-ROBOT promised the greatest opportunity for collaborative play and for children to attempt novel “adult” activities like adjusting a screw.
Attraction
Engagement #1
Engagement #2
Engagement #3
Closure
03. Testing the Robot
No, it really was a surprise. Over two rounds of testing and iteration at the Children’s Museum, I was constantly wowed by how delighted children were to play and engage with HELP-A-ROBOT. Sometimes kids even came back repeatedly to engage again or had to be pulled away by their parents.
We observed 31 visitors, conducted exit interviews, and synthesized our findings through a VEP engagement graph.
- Female caregiver to young boy
- Sibling to another sibling
- Caregiver to young boy
- Young boy
The thematic protocol was tightened to be more rigorous on the second round of iteration, so likely, engagement levels remained similar across both rounds of iteration and testing.
Need Speedy Feedback
The robot's expression changed after tasks, but more responsive feedback was needed. Without a clear narrative, helping the robot lacked defined start and end points. Sound, vocal, or tactile cues could better connect assistance with care.
Family Contexts
I initially expected more direct collaboration between caregivers and children, but by large, it depended. Some adults explain and direct play, especially when children are younger and require more guidance.
Others allow children to guide the play, only collaborating when their kids draw them in. A lot of collaborative play was actually between children, siblings taking turns or children playing different surfaces of the robot together.
Learning Empathy
Most children understood the robot needed help, and some children could directly link their repair efforts to the robot feeling better. Parents also occasionally began conversations about how the robot was feeling.
So I believe future iterations may have a real potential to create an even stronger relationship between repair and care.
04. Iterations On Our Solution
Over the course of prototyping, testing, and interviewing, we had two main iterations of HELP-A-ROBOT. While there's still so much I'd love to explore and change in the future, I learned a lot across both iterations.
05. Lessons Learned
Repair and care at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh
Although our team had no time for a third iteration, HELP-A-ROBOT opened up new possibilities for repair and care as a theme in exhibit design. Could there be disembodied robot parts which children can rotate around and fix? Or could we depart from robots and darn old socks for a teddy bear with cold feet?
Combining digital and analog
I went into this project determined to push around some pixels, and yet, surprisingly, I was the one to come up with a physical robot. Pushing myself to physically prototype, cut and piece together foam core, and striving to be scrappy was a great learning experience — one that I’ll take with me, whether I’m working with digital or analog.
Designing for kids
I’ve always loved Avatar the Last Airbender, and here’s a big reason why: they assume their audience (kids) are smart. And they're right. Kids are smart! Whenever there was an issue with my design, I understood it wasn’t because kids didn’t get it — but rather that I needed to communicate my design intentions more clearly.
