In Peques and Más we bring an interview with Erika Rossi a young Italian girl specializing in the design of interactions and the illustration she is receiving many awards for his beautiful project I Mirabilia based on three interactive dolls specially designed for hospitalized children. Erika has the most outstanding skills, the generation of concepts and ideas, the interaction flows and the scenarios in which she includes her video and drawing creations. Manage the main ones perfectly market design tools and also has Programming knowledge with Processing and Arduino. In 2008 he obtained his Degree in Industrial Design at the Faculty of Design and Art at the IUAV University of Venice. He currently works as interaction designer in Smart Design, based in Barcelona. Previously, she worked for two years at Fjord in Madrid as an interaction and visual design designer. In the interview, Erika tells us many details about her I Mirabilia project, with many awards received, and tells us her references, her passions and her plans for the future. What is I Mirabilia
I Mirabilia are a family of three interactive dolls for children with chronic diseases that require a lot of time in the hospital. The idea was born from my passion for interactive objects and illustration. I wanted to create a product that united the two things at the same time.
It occurred to me then to create something for the children, a subject that has always interested me and that I already explored during my projects of the first years of university. What he did know but did not want to do was a simple toy, but something intelligent that could meet the needs of many children. For that reason I began to explore the diseases and conditions in which many children of various ages find themselves, trying to see which were the fields that had not yet deepened in the interaction design sector. Without having any experience and awareness in the medical field, I was very attentive in choosing the objective of the project, addressing the needs that children in certain situations may have from a psychological point of view rather than a doctor.
Thus, I explored the symptoms of some very diffuse diseases in children such as dyslexia, diabetes and lack of attention but it was in chronic diseases (tumors, leukemia, etc.) that I found the widest variety of daily emotional needs. The main objective of the existing projects was to improve the relationships that children have outside the hospital. For example with classmates, parents, teachers, etc.
And what happens in the day-to-day life of these children inside the hospital? How do they interact with the other patients and with the doctors? I decided to focus my project on these relationships.
Why have you decided to work on children's feelings and emotions with fear, secrecy and shared play?
After many interviews and meetings with the operators and doctors of the Meyer Children's Hospital in Florence, I focused my project on the three sensations that these children often encounter in their day-to-day life: the feeling of guilt and remorse, which arises especially in the first period of hospitalization when they do not know why they are there and believe it is the punishment of their parents for something bad they have done; the loneliness, a very subtle and perpetual emotion that, if not remedied, can generate very dangerous psychological states; the shyness in relating to others, a feeling that seeks an unjustifiable shame due to the disease that hinders children in their daily relationships with other children and doctors.
These three symptoms are the main reasons that do not allow sick children to live their situation calmly and that require them a lot of strength and courage to fight during the illness. I decided, then to create a doll for each one of these states instead of a single toy, in such a way that a simpler level of interaction was generated and focused on each objective.
In what state is the i-Mirabilia project
Since 2011, I have been taking the project to many international conferences and design competitions and have been very successful in winning several awards, for example:
- Presentation to the TEDx Salzburg in September 2013
- Winner in the student project category of the Braun Prize 2012
- Winner in European Youth Awards 2012
- Finalist in IXDA Awards 2012
- Conference and paper published by Ambience 2011 - international conference about smart textile that took place in Sweden
- Winner of ICSR International conference on social robotics 2011, Amsterdam
- Article published by Studies in Material Thinking - volume 7
- Article published by Leonardo / The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology
- Winner of the category "Non-browser based" in Adobe Design Achievement Award 2011 and Ada Gallery
The project has interested some jurors of these competitions and I am in contact with them to see the future possibilities of commercialization, if there are any! For any information about the project and its process you can visit my website, Erika Rossi or rather the page specifically dedicated to the I Mirabilia project.
Who are your references in toy design
For the project I began my research analyzing the latest projects done in this regard by different designers such as Sara Johansson and her Sniff and Jørn Knutsen, Einar Sneve Martinussen and Timo Arnall. In these projects there are aspects of play and new technologies that come together in an almost magical mix and offer children new possibilities of interaction with objects and with each other, discovering the materiality of toys in new directions. That aspect and field of design interests me a lot and I hope to develop it more in my future career.
I would like the children to discover more the pleasure of sharing the moment of the game with each other and through digital media without this necessarily means being in front of a screen all day. There is a world of interactions and reactions that are manifested through facilities, digital toys and new media through which children can always learn by sharing experiences with other children, while developing the social relationships necessary to grow and form.
What kind of technology and materials do you apply to your creations
For this project I learned from scratch to sew and I liked it to such an extent that my parents gave me a sewing machine! For all the electronics I used Arduino and softwares like Processing (with great help from my classmates and teachers) and I would like to continue using them and exploring their possibilities a little more.
I really like to experience new materials and build prototypes with paper, cloth, ceramics and everything I need to model with my hands. All my experience has focused on the art and design environment, from the Art Institute to the Master in Interaction Design that I obtained in Venice in 2011 (Iuav University of Venice), going through my first career in Industrial Design.
Also the experience in Fjord, digital services consulting in Madrid, helped me a lot to complete the concept that is in I Mirabilia and now, working as an interaction designer at Smart Design in Barcelona, I can explore new views on the design that surely They will help me enrich and develop my idea.
What projects interest you for the future
Right now I have some ideas in my head that I will develop with some friends: one of these will be an installation that we will present at the TEI 2013 on the concept of "celebration" and another will be a mobile application on recycling objects.
And here the interview with Erika Rossi to which we thank the generosity with the readers of Peques and Más who would appreciate knowing the new trends and designs based on the ability to design about interactions and feelings. To end the interview, we present the video, extracted from the page of Erika, which illustrates the creations of I Mirabilia so that you know better the beautiful dolls thought from the need for children to have the least traumatic stay in the Hospital.
And here I leave you the dolls of I Mirabilia so you can see what kind of toys are being created for our children and that go beyond entertainment because they seek to solve children's needs.
