The brief
3-5% of school children are diagnosed with an Auditory Processing Disorder. APD causes difficulties processing sound. It can make it difficult to understand overlapping conversations, spoken instructions, similar sounding words and people in loud places.
Children with APD often struggle to interact due to not being able to fully hear their teachers or peers, leading to low self-esteem, anxiety and depression from feeling isolated.
Explaining the google doodle
Therefore, i came up up with the idea of a Google Doodle campaign that aims to spread awareness by using its platform to make the population more aware of APD, using overlapping text to represent the overwhelming experience of not being able to hear properly. The colours and overlapping text was inspired by risograghs and speech bubbles to show auditory confusion.
the APD game
Part of this campaign includes a Google puzzle game that follows a young fox character with APD named freddy. the goal is to Help him as he tries to manage everyday conversations without getting too anxious, each level gets harder as the audio gets more distorted due to louder environments. There are four levels to this game with the first being talking to their mum (easiest) and the final level being a birthday party (the hardest).
Reward system
to encourage people to engage in learning about APd, I made sure that their would be rewards for reaching each level. Every time a level is complete the player recieves a unique illustration based off the level (e.g. freddy's mum's pancakes) as well as a fact about apd to inprove learning.
Development
below are some of the development sketches behind the game and the google design
