BUDDY: A Companion Product Design for Alleviating Parent-Child Separation Anxiety

When children firstly enter kindergarten, parent-child separation anxiety usually happens and may affect both parents’ and children’s lives. This is a common problem in parent-child relationship, especially in China. To tackle the problem, the study carried out i) a deep understanding of separation anxiety based on user research methods; ii) the generation of an innovative interaction design consisting of a physical toy accompanying children directly and an interactive software enabling the communication between children and parents; and iii) formal user tests to verify the usability and effectiveness of the proposed design. Particularly, BUDDY, a companion product was developed with advantages in unique animal shape design, the interaction strategy of communication in staggered time, and the integration of fairy tales to form the narrative interaction framework. With such design, it is expected to effectively relieve the separation anxiety of children and parents, and meanwhile reduce the overdependence of each other.