Ben’s Box
I designed “Ben’s Box”, a subscription box of musician trivia cards. This project was the outcome of “Impact Design”, a class at Dartmouth centered at the intersection of design and psychology, with a term-long project to design a personalized delight experience for a child with severe autism.
Timeline: 7 weeks
Team: 4 Dartmouth students
Role: Design Research, Product Design, Experience Design
Through our class, my team was paired with a student, Ben, at a local school for children with severe Autism Spectrum Disorder. Our task was to design a product and experience that would delight Ben.
Background
Research
We met with Ben twice, for an hour each time, to get to know him better and understand his likes, dislikes, and habits.
Our main findings were:
Process
We began by sorting through our research and brainstorming different ideas for what might delight Ben.
We initially had a lot of difficulty due to the fact that Ben was not interested in playing or doing any of the things we traditionally associated with delight. My team decided that our final product would have to be something Ben could do independently and would fit in with his desire to feel grown up.
We narrowed down on two How Might We questions:
We created a few different prototypes, including a “choose your own adventure” book, a “man cave” where Ben could have alone time surrounded by his favorite things, and a set of musician trading card, and presented the prototypes to Ben to see which he liked the best.
The cards ended up being his favorite, so we decided to develop those further.
We designed the cards to cater to Ben’s distinct music taste, creating a few cards featuring mucisians from different decades. Each card featured a few facts about the artist and QR code linking to a hit song.
To extend our final product’s impact, we turned our card prototype into a 5-month subscription box. Once a month, Ben would receive a fresh new deck of musician cards in his personal mailbox, which he could then add to his collection housed in a custom laser-cut card box. For each musician card, we also included a corresponding trivia card. This way, Ben can engage with others through the questions or enjoy them on his own.
I designed the cards on Figma and my teammates created the box and mailbox.
I created five sets of different cards with different themes: the 60s, 70s, 80s, Classical, and “all star”, which included some of Ben’s favorite artists. Each set had 16 cards— 8 artist cards and 8 trivia cards. The artist cards had a picture and fun fact about the artist, as well as a QR code to one of their music videos. The trivia cards asked about the fun fact that was given on the artist card.
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A monthly delivery to his personalized mailbox.
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A monthly box with a new deck and other goodies.
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A custom laser-cut box to hold his card collection.
Check out our full process video!
Reflection
Unfortunately, due to COVID, we were never able to give Ben his box in person. However, we gave it to one of his caregivers, who was completely blown away and said that Ben loved it.
Working with Ben was a wonderful experience and taught me a lot about empathy and thinking outside of the box. It was very rewarding to create something that had a tangible impact on someone. My team initially had a lot of trouble with ideation and felt incredibly stuck. Ben didn’t fit our expectations going into the project; teams who had taken this class in the past often created very tactile or play-based experiences, so Ben’s age and desire to feel grown-up was an unexpected challenge. This forced me and my other team members to reframe our project and own up to the biases we held. Once we did this, we were able to see that these challenges were really opportunities, and we were able to create something that Ben would find truly delightful.
This was my first design project where the final solution wasn't intended to have any function or use beyond creating delight, which in some ways was more difficult. It was also a good reminder that eliciting delight should be a consideration in most design projects.
