We recently held the second workshop to design mSootheBox – our new Augmented Reality (AR) app based on the use of safe distraction techniques, which is aiming to help young people who self-harm. The workshop was attended by young people aged 16-25 years, and jointly led by industry experts from Sparta Digital, who had been working hard to develop the ideas produced in Workshop 1.
Sparta began by recapping the first workshop and reminding the young people of the four key concepts they had come up with. These were:
- ‘AR Pet’ (pictured) – where a user would look after/play with/exercise a virtual pet in the users real environment
- ‘Walking stories’ – which would encourage a user to exercise whilst completing a story
- ‘Customisable Environment’ – which would create an AR environment of things that make a user happy e.g. images, objects etc.
- ‘My happy place’ – which would allow users to upload/share a personalised ‘happy place’, placing it on a map and adding songs, notes etc. for other users to find
Working in groups, the young people chose their favourite concept and created a ‘Paper Prototype’, designing how they would like the app to look, different screens, its features etc. in much more detail. After presenting their ideas to the rest of the group and discussing each one, the young people were then asked to consider how much customisation they would like to see in the app, such as being able to change the colours, logo or name. It was clear that everybody had different preferences for these options, so it is definitely something that needs to be considered in the final design!
Once again, we had a fantastic and very creative workshop, and everyone was very impressed with the ideas produced. In Workshop 3 the young people will finalise the protoypes, and think more about how AR could be used in the app.
If you are aged 16-25 and would like to get involved, please email us at Camhs.Digital@gmail.com or fill in this form.
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