Product Design: A customizable sensory therapeutic toy for people with Autism with heightened sensory input.
Problem: Each person with Autism has a different set of sensory preferences, and there are a limited amount of toys designed specifically for individuals with sensory needs, especially ones that are customizable, multifaceted, and affordable.
“How might we allow people on the Autism spectrum with heightened sensitivity to self-regulate their state of emotion and alertness?”
Solution: TactTiles is a box with magnetic, detachable tile sides, each with a different texture or dynamic interactive component. Users can choose which textures to attach to the sides based on their preferences, and store the others inside the box.
Role: Designer with ownership physical platform developement.
Impact: Used Illustrator and Solidworks to design and built portable, modular, and delightful TactTiles experience that successfully helped kids on the Austism Spectrum regulate their emotions and behavior.
We want to help autistic kids regulate they mood to be in the green zone. Every kid is different in terms of how they might be calmed down, but there is a population of highly-sensory children who can be soothed using strategic sensory stimulation, like Mr. Ryleigh.
To stabilize one’s mood, the box had to be:
Delightful so that students will engage with the box for a duration of time and learn to actively seek the product when in a unengaged or overly-distressed state of being. We wanted to use delight to help them behavior regulation.
Intuitive and Easy for a kid to learn how to remove and attach tiles, but strong enough so that the tiles can be played with without falling off the box.
For example, this gear train tile had to be magnetic enough to stay on the side of the box while someone spins a gear. But it couldn’t be overly-magnetized otherwise it would be too difficult to remove and swap out for another tile:
Portable so that students can learn behavior regulation with the box in school and use these skills at home. After testing with large, medium, and small boxes, we found that it should be small enough to fit in one's lap, buLook at how easy it is to carry:
(thanks for the demo Carson ☺️)
TactTiles is a box with magnetic, detachable tile sides, each with a different texture or dynamic interactive component. Users can choose which textures to attach to the sides based on their mood and store the other tiles inside the box. The tiles are designed to stimulate the user’s tactile and visual senses to create a delightful experience that calmly resets their focus and energy.
In one of our interviews with a specialist, we learned that cause and effect relationships are particularly engaging for the autistic population. This led us to create the following dynamic tiles, which prompted the most delight during testing.
This was an amazing project to be a part of, and a very fun, interesting and rewarding problem to work on. I also learned a lot from Carson, who is a super fantastic designer. If you're curious about our full process, you can read more in the full TactTiles Case Study.