Eyeam is a brand and kit to help children build empathy skills. Through the use of perspective taking and discussing emotions, the children gain a greater understanding of their own feelings as well as how others around them feel and think. By using the kit to transform regular objects into expressive creatures, they get an opportunity to explore these empathy skills in a playful and comfortable way.
A breakdown of how to use the kit and the value created through it. Though the project had a core focus on the development of empathy skills, it also improves the children’s cognitive development, social skills and promotes creativity/imaginative thinking. Teachers and parents can use the prompt cards to encourage discussions about emotions as well as children playing together without an adult input.
The concept originated from visiting the Hamilton School for the Deaf and observing the social difficulties for deaf children while communicating with hearing children. This gave me the drive to create a kit to help children understand the differences in difficulties or needs that we all as individuals have. I felt that making an extremely visual and tangible design was key to making the kit accessible to anyone. I also chose the playful and colourful aesthetic to create a more welcoming experience for an often hard to discuss topic of emotions.
Alongside designing the kit, I also created the brand eyeam. It was inspired by visualising emotions and how I chose to do this through the eye pieces. The eye pieces therefore can be used to represent an individual and their experiences, whether they are fictional or real stories. They are a way to prompt discussions such as, “I am feeling…because of…”, so the brand eyeam naturally emerged. The kit will act as a new form of communication between hearing and deaf pupils with a focus on emotions, thus helping the children to understand each other better.
Screen templates for The Sankofa Journey app. This project explores an alternative form of education for those in Malawi who have had to drop out from school due to social, economic, environmental, racial, or political factors.
A breakdown of how the app connects current university students and employers with those who have experienced barriers to an education. It creates a continuous cycle of knowledge sharing, community connections and new career opportunities. This will help to reduce the amount of people who currently choose to move away from Malawi to access training and education.
This model was created to experiment with different ways to display the various actions in the app. The app screens can be removed from the base and slotted into a centre display stand. It was tried out at our exhibition in The Lighthouse earlier this year and received great feedback on both how it displayed the screens and how it worked as an interactive exhibition piece.
A look into how the app helps individuals to achieve their personal educational goals. It includes a range of both practical and academic mini credentials to collect. The range will gradually get bigger and bigger as new people with new skills join the Sankofa Journey.
