Moments
A memorialisation platform for parents
Greta Castellana, Cat Kilkenny, Milo Hill and Ivor Williams
Since 2018, we have been researching and building prototypes that help define the future of children’s hospice care, for a brand new children’s hospice being developed by Fondazione Seràgnoli near Bologna in Italy. We believe hospice care that can use human-centred design and technology successfully and meaningfully can transform the way professionals deliver care, and bring a better care experience for patients and their families.
Our first prototype, The Connected Garden, fused principles of horticultural therapy with meaningful uses of technology, to create interactive living plants that enable children and their families to engage in cooperative play. In doing so, we hope to enable and support accessible use of a garden space for every visitor and patient of the hospice. While the second Chiara, an AI-powered chatbot, provides parents with personalised information they might need to get the right support from the right person, at the right time.
Our third prototype in the project was in many ways the most sensitive so far. We called it Moments, and it is a digital platform for parents, and the people close to them, to help build and hold a safe space for memories of a child.
Our starting point
Given our previous focus around early stages of the hospice experience (with onboarding supportive tools like Chiara), we felt it could be valuable to dedicate time at the closing phases of the hospice journey, where bereavement and memorialisation are important stages for some families to experience.
We understood the value of the hospice and the role of its professionals doesn’t end with the child’s death. Moreover, we learned that bereaved families often actively share their knowledge and experience with families who may be preparing for a death, who often feel isolated when contemplating the loss of their child. The relationships and bonds that are created around grief and bereavement are incredibly powerful, and we wanted to help support them as much as possible.
We believed that the hospice could become a hub for promoting supportive interactions and maintaining relationships within and between families after bereavement.
Learning from people
To understand more about people’s current understanding, motivations and feelings around memory-making, we conducted informal surveys with our network to hear from families’ own words what these activities meant to them. One of our questions asked, what are the biggest benefits of memory-making and legacy activities for you as a parent? To which they replied:
- “Feeling positive and having a focus.”
- “Good memories help to get you through the most difficult times.”
- “Just having a lovely time with the kids, like most families can spend their whole lives doing.”
This last response was typical of the need for families to create memories that reinforced as much as possible, the normal, everyday lives they had with their children.
We later held a remote workshop with parents, co-facilitated by a parent with lived experience, to further explore memory-making. This reinforced the concept of memories as being useful in the present by providing meaningful thoughts, with families also wanting to ensure that other people helped populate and contribute to the collective story of a child. We uncovered many important insights from our workshop including:
- Making memories isn’t a normal activity. Parents just want to be normal and prefer to just do normal things that create memories (such as holidays or trips).
- Memories captured by other people and shared to the family were helpful in making up a fuller picture of the child.
These explorations fed into our design process which enabled us to develop some minimally viable features in a deployable prototype that families could use.
Introducing Moments
Moments is a digital platform for a parent’s most special memories. It is designed to capture everyday normal events and create a richer picture of a child’s life.
It feels quite safe. There’s lots of things you can build onto. And a nice thing you can share with people you trust.
– Michelle
How it works
Moments is a useful tool to quickly record memories during the child’s life.
Due to its simplicity in uploading new content, we know that people find Moments useful for capturing spontaneous moments as they occur.
It’s a really good thing to put everything in one place. Because I put stuff all over the place and I rely on things like Facebook, which is not good.
—Steph
We also found that people were comfortable using Moments to look back at memories and adding new content at their own time after the child’s death.
I felt really excited about the potential for making a diary scrapbook of memories, with filmed videos, writing so that’s really cool. Lovely. It’s a beautiful idea so I noticed I got quite excited when I saw the options for that as a real possibility for me and for the parents of my group.
– Nicola
Moments allows people to add a feeling or mood to the uploaded content, providing more emotional context to the event. Moreover, it allows the family to relive the same moment from a different perspective, and allows them to track how they feel over time.
I think the emotion tracker gives the app a little bit more versatility, because it feels more like it’s a memory, rather than a diary.
– Fiona
Continuing our development
With Moments we expressed a tangible output from an expansive set of research, insights, themes, concepts and scenarios. We know there are many more opportunities to transform children’s hospice care for the better, and continue to develop new prototypes to do so.
Do you want to use Moments in your service? Get in touch!
Contact project lead Ivor Williams to learn more.
This article was written to support Children’s Hospice Week (22–28 June 2020). To learn more about the Helix Centre’s work in children’s hospice care, visit our website.
