Transforming
Sick Days with Play
Client: PlayHouse MD
My Role: Project Lead, Research Lead,
Industrial Design
DESIGN CHALLENGE
How might we reimagine care experiences for children, caregivers, and healthcare practitioners through tools and experiences that center a kid's needs and POV?
RESEARCH + DESIGN PROCESS
I was responsible for leading a team including industrial designers, business designers, engineers, and prototypers through three iterative loops of research and design to create the future of kids care experiences.
As project lead, I managed the project plan and owned key stakeholder relationships to ensure the team would deliver work that truly exceeded client expectations.
I also designed and lead the research program that supported this work - a multi-phase mixed methods approach that helped uncover needs and opportunities for innovation to serve parents and kid ages 0-6 years old.
The research program was designed to provide the team with foundational insight, as well as to deliver ongoing learnings as we built and tested prototypes.
The heart of our research was qualitative interviews and home visits with kids and families across the US, which was in turn supplemented with a larger video diary survey to build confidence in our qualitative learnings.
In addition to leading the research program, I guided product design, prototyping, testing, and development of all concepts - both by contributing industrial design support and also by project managing a larger team of designers, engineers, and contractors to deliver the final designs and multiple sets of looks-like works-like prototypes.
OUTCOME + IMPACT
Our designs enabled Playhouse MD to raise multiple rounds of seed funding to support manufacturing, marketing, media and social marketing activations, and ultimately enable them to bring real product to market, with four of our designs launching in major retail outlets in fall 2025.
The story of Playhouse and their new suite of products has already been picked up by major news outlets including Forbes, and the designs have been nominated for multiple major design awards.
Learn more at www.playhouseMD.com