On Fatherhood
‘‘Often dads-to-be admit to feeling guilty and left out of pregnancy and find it difficult to connect with the experience due to the lack of physical changes in them or not being able to help or ease the pain of their partner. This translates into them being underconfident when handling their newborns or connecting with them’’.
The brief of this project was to identify moments in one's life that could make or break someone's life story and use the design tools at our hands to provide solutions to make these moments less daunting.
Fatherhood was interesting to us, especially when speaking of communication among men in our society and the roles that they play or are expected to play.
All of our research led us to finalize the following brief: Help expecting fathers navigate pregnancy more confidently by focusing on their knowledge about pregnancy, their role in the process, and in their family and making it easier to communicate about and during pregnancy.
We established a user timeline and spoke with men on various phases of the timeline: Trimester 1, Trimester 2, Trimester 3, and New Fathers.
After interviewing all these men we concluded that men found it difficult to speak about their experiences, thoughts, and fears around the pregnancy of their partner and need open spaces that could address some of their concerns. We also found that there was a factor of the guilt of not being able to help their partner in times of extreme duress and the feeling of being helpless.
We approached 2 stakeholder groups, DadsRock, Edinburgh, and Home-Start, Glasgow, and conducted expert interviews as well as attended Antenatal Classes to meet with fathers and run them through an engagement tool we had created. We asked the fathers to map out their immediate contacts, the places they visit, and their comfort levels in discussing hopes and fears about their pregnancy with these people in these spaces.
Ethnography
We worked with DadsRock, Edinburgh, and Home-Start, Glasgow, and conducted expert interviews as well as attended Antenatal Classes.
As a part of this system, we created a Pregnancy box. Every expecting couple will receive one of these boxes at the start of their third trimester. The box contains brochures, information about baby products, schemes that parents can apply to, benefits that they are entitled to, books on parenting, along with a number of products that we’ve come up with in order to help parents, especially expecting dads, navigate pregnancy with more confidence.
We designed a physical experience to complement the online services that would be provided. We saught to include both Online & Offline engagement tools to ensure that most users could be included in the process, also keeping in mind external stakeholders such as stores, shopping chains as well as the NHS.
The Pregnancy Box
The Pregnancy box is modeled after the Baby Box that the Scottish Government provides to every expecting couple for when the baby is born.
