The binding problem: making a book that survives being loved
A stapled prototype taught us that a book which falls apart is not a book. Here is how the sealed spine came to be.
✦ Pilot
Twelve families, one spring: what our Berlin pilot taught us
We put a MirthTale on twelve nightstands in March and asked families to be blunt. They were.
Between March and May, twelve households around Berlin lived with a pre-production MirthTale, alongside the nine families from the earlier kitchen-table prototype. The children were between two and eight. We asked parents for honest notes and got roughly four hundred of them. Here is what changed as a result.
Children re-read more than we expected
We had planned for a book a night. What we saw was a book every two or three nights, read many times in between. The most-read book in the pilot, "Splash.", was read over forty times by one two-year-old. This confirmed the paper decision and changed our paper refill estimate: a roll goes further than we thought.
Blank nights are normal
Every family had nights when the child pressed the button and had nothing. We had built MirthTale to write a whole book in that case, but parents didn't know that, and felt they had failed. We changed the caregiver guide, and wrote a short guide about it.
Siblings changed the age dial
Three families had two children of different ages. All three discovered, without being told, that they could print the same story twice at two ages. This became a feature we now describe on the box.
The screen really did go dark
We were nervous about this. In twelve weeks we saw no child try to use the display after the first day. Several parents named it as the reason they'd keep the device.
Hard subjects
Four families used MirthTale for something difficult: a hospital stay, a first day at school, a pet that died. The books were among the most re-read in the pilot. We wrote about what we learned in books about hard things.
What broke
Two paper jams, both from a roll loaded backwards. One pack with a dirty contact. The button on one unit became sticky after an incident involving honey. All three are now in the support guide.