Interactive stress-free toy design for students studying overseas

Abstract

The aim of this project is to create a relaxing product to release East-Asian international students’ stress in order to be in a better health. The direction of this project focuses on handling the students’ negative emotions produced by stress to avoid negative consequences happening such as depression. This project begins in secondary research about stress followed by case studies of the existing products along with an interview with the target users. The case studies use the KJ method to find the design elements of existing relaxing products. Moreover, there is deeply understanding of the students’ stress and the effective method of releasing the students’ stress through the interview of East-Asian international students. After the research, the author transfers the information from research into design rationales and decides the design direction of this project with the design rationales. The design direction of this project is to design an interactive robot to increase the interaction between the students and their family to achieve the goal of relaxation. There is an initial focus group to gain the user’s feedback from after the initial design, and a redesign with the feedback. Finally, there is a final focus group to evaluate the final design and the final design uses the user’s feedback as the reference to amend and develop in the future.