BABEL BABY — speculative design / brain-computer interfaces

Our client for this speculative design project was the R&D lab of a major Bay Area tech company. They came to us with a brief to explore how Brain-Computer Interfaces could affect our lives in the near future. Our focus area was life with infants. We were asked to conduct research and learn about the needs of young parents with newborns, to design and create a BCI prototype that addressed these needs, and to produce a critical design video that explored the ethical implications of these technologies.

/ Concept video

We conducted in-depth interviews with parents of newborns to learn about the general challenges of living with babies as well as their take on bringing new technologies into their babies’ lives.

One of the issues that was repeatedly brought up was parents having to deal with crying fits and feeling helpless as babies are unable to express themselves via verbal language. We conducted desk research to learn more about how communication works between parents and their babies.

We decided to explore the ways in which BCI technology could facilitate this communication between parents and babies. We imagined that it could potentially learn over time how the baby’s brain signals map to feelings of hunger, pain, etc. We came up with Babel Baby.

Babel Baby identifies the brain activity of a baby in distress and notifies the parents. During the calibration phase, parents take care of the baby’s needs and train Babel Baby by logging what action helped to relieve the stress. Through machine learning, it starts to distinguish between the different needs of the baby and to possibly detect the need before the baby starts crying.

We designed and produced a quick prototype that could mimic the interface of such a device. And we used Wizard of Oz techniques to test the experience with parents.

The responses parents had to the various scenarios we tested formed the basis of some of the issues addressed in the concept video.