Folia: the smart tree that shows your community at home
During the Make-a-Ton, students from different fields of study joined forces to come up with ways to empower parents in raising their children. Folia is one of the innovative solutions that emerged: a tree that brings your community into your living space. Discover Folia and meet Janne and Sibald, the creative minds behind this invention.
What challenge does Folia aim to address?
"How can we break the taboo around parental burnout and help parents prevent it? And how can we overcome the feeling that parents are alone in their parenting journey?" This was the challenge posed by Victor Nelen from BlinkOut, together with Gentse Spruiten, to the team of Janne and Sibald.
Many parents sometimes feel lonely and stuck at home, especially new parents with very young children. Cases of parental burnout are becoming increasingly common.
How does Folia work?
Folia is a tree that brings your community into your living space by lowering the barrier to connecting, even when physical contact isn't possible. Our invention is a tree where leaves represent the members of a community. The leaves come in different colors, reflecting the various moods of community members. The tree would be placed in the living room of every member of the community. This makes it easy to see how your community is doing. With our solution, parents in the same community no longer feel lonely, and they can connect more easily with other parents.
The minds behind Folia
Smart solutions require smart thinkers. Meet the three whizz students who came up with Folia:
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Janne, an industrial design student at Ghent University
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Sibald, an industrial engineering student at KU Leuven
The inventors at work
Discover all the solutions that came out of the Make-a-Ton
Also, a shout-out to all the other students. Together, they created prototypes to help people raise their children with confidence. From ‘Folia,’ a tree that brings your community into your living space, to ‘TinyToyTransformers,’ a mobile playground for children aged 0 to 3. Please note that these solutions are only ideas converted into an initial prototype for testing. They are not (yet) available for use. In the next phase, Comon brings partners together in a 'Microlab'. There, a diverse team of people from Ghent will work on further developing, testing, and implementing one of the solutions from the Make-a-Ton into a fully functioning prototype.
