Role
Team
Timeline
Design Solution
NBHD (Neighborhood) is a digital branding toolkit that empowers small businesses to create and share engaging content for their local communities. Through guided tools and educational resources, the platform helps business owners understand branding systems and collaborate more effectively with professional designers when they are ready to grow their brand. This will result in more effective marketing strategies and improved long-term success for small businesses.
Phase 01
The Problem
How might we increase education and accessibility to both parents and children at home and at school that will help mitigate and support moments of emotional dysregulation for both parties?
Our Solution
Mood Buddy is a therapeutic service combining a smart teddy bear and a connected app to help children regulate emotions. The bear uses color cues and guided breathing to calm the child, while the app notifies parents, tracks emotional patterns, and provides insights through a digital journal. Designed for families and educational settings, Mood Buddy fosters emotional awareness and strengthens parent-child connections.
Secondary Research
We began our collaborative project with several group conversations on what problem spaces exists for kids and parents today, and there were so many especially since all of us can recall our childhood experiences and we just wanted to make it a bit easier for kids to better understand their emotions and for parents to be right there with them in the passenger seat to support their children. We broke our initial research into 3 stages, Attribution and research is the group seeking out information that's factual and public. Stage 2 is Clusters & Patterns we noticed in our Stage 1 data. Stage 3 are insights and how might we's created based on the previous stages.
Insights
Primary Research
We began our collaborative project with several group conversations on what problem spaces exists for kids and parents today, and there were so many especially since all of us can recall our childhood experiences and we just wanted to make it a bit easier for kids to better understand their emotions and for parents to be right there with them in the passenger seat to support their children. We broke our initial research into 3 stages, Attribution and research is the group seeking out information that's factual and public. Stage 2 is Clusters & Patterns we noticed in our Stage 1 data. Stage 3 are insights and how might we's created based on the previous stages.
Interview Insights: Perspective Argument Between Parent & Child
Our collaboration project took me and my group to real parents and their children who are actively experiencing this disconnect we are trying to solve in our problem space. We interviewed 5 families, which helped better but this problem space in a better perspective.
Journey Map Argument Between Parent & Child
Service Opportunity
Why This Opportunity Space Was Exciting to Find
Rising emotional tension, communication breakdown, and power struggles aren't isolated problems, they're stages of the same escalating dynamic between parents and children navigating new independence. What made this opportunity space exciting wasn't finding conflict, conflict in parent-child relationships is well documented, it was finding where that conflict could actually be redirected. Reciprocal learning, a child's early desire for independence, and reframing parenting as a partnership rather than a hierarchy all pointed toward the same underlying opportunity: kids and parents don't need fewer disagreements, they need better tools for navigating them together. That reframe, from managing conflict to building partnership, is what shaped MoodBuddy's entire direction from here.
Persona's
Phase 02
Revised Problem Statement
Service Visualization
Service Storyboard
Business Model
Is this Business Model Effective?
This model works because it doesn't ask families to pay for something intangible, it pairs the emotional education service with a physical product, the embedded-tech stuffed animal, that gives the value proposition something tangible to anchor to. The revenue structure reflects that same thinking: a one-time cost for the toy and journal keeps the entry point accessible, while the sliding-scale subscription lets pricing flex based on what a family can actually afford, especially for welfare partners who might otherwise be priced out entirely. Partnering with family therapists, child welfare organizations, and parenting platforms isn't just a distribution strategy, it builds trust before a parent even encounters the product, which matters given how personal and sensitive this space is. The main risk sits in cost structure: assembling embedded tech into a physical product, plus the UI/UX and research investment behind it, means margins depend heavily on scaling ecommerce and partner channels efficiently. But grounding the model in trust-based partnerships rather than cold customer acquisition gives it a realistic path to sustaining that cost over time.
System Map
MoodBuddy Service Blueprint
Journey Map: Parent Introducing MoodBuddy to Child
Why This Journey Map Was Critical to Understand
This is arguably the most emotionally charged interaction MoodBuddy needed to design for, a child rejecting the idea before ever giving it a chance. Mapping it out revealed something important: rejection didn't come from the product itself, it came from how the introduction was framed. The conflict stage shows the child interpreting MoodBuddy as being forced on them rather than offered to them, and the negotiation stage shows a parent trying to fix that through control ("we'll learn it together") rather than through choice. That's why the resolve stage matters most: the parent backs off, deescalates, and removes pressure entirely, which is what actually opens the door for the child to come back on their own terms in the aftermath. Seeing that arc mapped out made it clear that MoodBuddy's success isn't just about the product's design, it's about designing the introduction experience itself so it never feels imposed. That insight directly shaped how MoodBuddy's onboarding and parent guidance materials needed to coach the introduction moment, not just the product use afterward.
Phase 03
Moodboard
Logo Exploration
Style Guide
Phase 04
MoodBuddy Journal
Phase 05
MoodBuddy Mobile App
Is the App Even Needed All the Time?
Yes, and the research is what confirms it rather than assumes it. MoodBuddy's app isn't the relationship, the connection between parent and child, but it is the monitor that makes the rest of the service loop possible. Without it, mood tracking, journal insights, and parental advice would all rely on a child proactively communicating how they feel, which is exactly the gap this project set out to close in the first place. The app closes that gap quietly: check-in nudges like "Hey there! Kylie, just tapped me 5 times" surface a signal the parent would otherwise miss entirely, and the mood insights and journal summaries translate that raw signal into something a parent can actually act on. Even the bear-pairing moment matters here, it's not just onboarding, it's establishing the physical-to-digital link that the entire monitoring loop depends on. So the app isn't a constant, active presence for the child, but it needs to run continuously in the background for the parent-facing side of the service to function at all.
Phase 06
MoodBuddy Bear
Hardware Longevity Consideration
The heart-shaped internals were designed around one priority: the bear needs to keep working for as long as a family actually needs the service, without becoming another piece of tech that dies and gets tossed. The fabric heart cutout houses the button system and embedded tech in a compact, low-power setup built to run on a coin cell battery for extended use with modern low-energy components. If the battery does eventually run down, the heart is designed to be clipped out and the battery swapped in seconds, no need to replace the whole bear or send it in for repair. That small design decision matters more than it might seem: it means a temporary hardware issue never has to interrupt the emotional continuity of the service. MoodBuddy goes right back to work, and parents can keep resting easy with real-time insight into how their child is doing, right from their connected mobile device.
Project Reflection
Collaborative Studio was one of the most genuinely different experiences of my design education. Working on Mood Buddy with a team of four pushed me to think beyond my own instincts and learn how to design with people rather than alongside them. The project itself was meaningful designing a service for children. Emotional regulation is the kind of work that reminds you why design matters outside of aesthetics. What made it challenging was that four people bring four different working styles, four different priorities, and four different ideas of what good looks like. Learning to navigate that without losing the integrity of the concept was the real skill being developed, and it is one I will carry into every collaborative environment I work in professionally.
Next Steps
Huge thank you to my studio group members, this was such an exciting project to be a a part of.