Mooders
Design is often thought of as something that improves our everyday life either by making it more beautiful or by making concrete situations better. But what if design could do more than just that? Critical design is a self-reflexive design practice that comes up with speculative and sometimes absurd solutions in order to visualize difficult issues.
Design a product that is critical or speculative and allows for a conversation about the problem behind the design.
Mooders – A wristband for children in kindergarden to register their emotions and alert the pedagogues. They can be either happy, sad og angry. This frees up the pedagogues having to estimate the children’s emotions and allow them to focus on the children that need their attention the most. This would enable each kindergarden to take care of more children, thus saving the government a lot of money and creating more independant children.
In reality this design is a critique of the lack of ‘warm hands’ in welfare professions. Especially when it comes to the care of elders, there is a tendency to outsource their care to technology. By using this approach in regards to kids, we wanted to draw attention to the deficiencies and dystopian qualities of this tendency.
We presented our design at a design exhibition at Dokk1 and had some really great conversations about our design and the intention behind it. Besides our Mooders-wristband, we brought along a “class-set” of Mooders and our written design fictions to further inform people visiting our stand about the intent of our design.
Design Process
Brainstorm
The first step of the designprocess was to decide on what we wanted to have a conversation about and how we could do it.
Create A Working Prototype
Then we created a working prototype that users could interact with and we could have a conversation about.
Present at design exhibition
We presented our design at an exhibition to see if it worked and was able to spark up conversations about technology as welfare
Reflect and iterate
Ideally, the next step would be to reflect and iterate. Unfortunately due to the length of the course, we only had time to reflect.