Make-A-Wish
Granting wishes for critically ill children
( Services )
- Customer Experience
For critically ill children, it can be challenging to comprehend and understand their emotions.
Make-A-Wish® Australia creates inspirational, life-changing wishes for children with a critical illness.
As one of Australia’s most trusted charities, they work in partnership with sick children, their families, medical teams and communities to design and deliver wishes that are as unique as the children who imagine them.
Make-A-Wish partnered with DEPT® in 2023 to bring to life an idea from the Foundation’s Imagination Lab which is designed to comprehensively support and engage children through exceptional Wish Journeys.
The vision was to create an immersive MyWish app where children can explore, experiment and engage with their wish ideas, sparking greater imagination, creativity and resilience through the experience.
Empowering children to wish big.
DEPT® set to work on creating an app that would deepen engagement across the Wish Journey. We designed a digital technology platform that could span multiple wish stages, initially catering to a child’s process of ideating, designing, and anticipating their wish.
This included the creation of the child’s customisable avatar, a daily emotion check-in, and their avatar’s journey to explore their wish ideas in a fun, immersive way capture their wish. By implementing accessible design principles, the MyWish App also encourages children to better understand themselves and what’s important to them, helping them more easily articulate their one true wish.
Creating an inclusive world: The meticulous design of the MyWish App
We built an app where children can become ‘space explorers,’ completing pre-wish missions that encourage imaginative thinking and help them imagine and capture their wish ideas. The app also helps kids to better understand and manage their emotions with positive psychology principles built in, such as a daily emotion tracker. The app was designed to effortlessly help kids process the range of emotions they might experience on their Wish Journey, while building strengths like creativity, resilience and confidence.
MyWish was created in Unity 3D for iOS and Android devices, focusing on customisation and user-generated content. To facilitate fun interactions whilst users answer various questions, extensive design and development was required. The character avatar generator was a highlight of this, which compressed an extensive amount of personalisation options into a very easy to understand user interface.
Turning ideas into reality with MyWish
By utilising immersive technology to educate and engage children, MyWish provides users with an interactive method of promoting self-confidence and increasing their sense of strengths and emotional awareness. MyWish serves as an accessible digital companion tool to support critically ill children throughout their Wish Journey.
““By bringing together some of the world’s leading thinkers in creativity and imagination, positive psychology, and digital experiences, we have created something incredibly special… The MyWish app is fun, immersive and allows the younger kids in our program the freedom to explore a world of possibilities as they begin to imagine their wish, whilst recognising their own unique strengths along the way.”
”Sally Bateman, CEO of Make-A-Wish Australia
Questions?
Head of Australia & NZ
Evan Davey
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