Interactiveety

Role

Designed complete experience for mixed-material toys that encompass interactive play and storytelling to foster cognitive and emotional learning in children.

Skills

Prototyping Multi-Modal Design Concept Design

Interactions Programming Video Making

Designing a multi-sensory experience beyond the screen

"The human mind is exquisitely tailored to make sense out of the world. Give it the slightest cue and off it goes, providing explanation, rationalization, and understanding" - Don Norman.

The problem that we were challenged to solve was to design and build an interactive application or installation that creates a multi-sensory experience and we were specifically asked to think beyond the screen.

That is when I started thinking about creative immersive experiences that foster both cognitive and emotional learning. Books, cinema, theatre, amusement parks, museums seek to create rich experiences for their users. Most of these emphasize on cognitive and emotional learning up to varying extents. But then, there hasn't been a lot of room for both at the comfort of home that consider ease of access and cost-effectiveness.

Problem Scoping

I wanted to address curiosity within us, especially during our formative years. As an aunt, I had observed how my pre-school nephews and nieces loved playing with physical toys. They thoroughly enjoyed holding these toys, feeling them and their expressions of joy was priceless. I wanted to create an experience simply magical for them at several levels.

Soon, I began to ponder about magical experiences for me and that meant multi-sensory experience. In order to achieve this, I used different materials that varied in color and texture and piezoelectric sensors that play audio when users interact with the toys.

Over the course of the project, my design evolved considerably. My primary goal was to create something interactive, colorful, fun and exciting for children. While my final deliverable manages to achieve all of these, my ideas have evolved from an interactive jigsaw puzzle to cube that takes in audio input to narrate stories to an interactive object that senses body temperature to work in specific mannerisms to the final concept of this set of interactive toys.

My important takeway was that as technology evolves, touchscreens might become obsolete and designing for the future needs a different thought process by itself.

Solution Exploration

Interactive toys fall under a category of their own and a lot of products exist in this space. However, what is truly missing is an element of combined interactivity. In the sense, I discovered that almost every interactive toy worked in isolation and not together. I wanted to create an electronic playground of sorts for these user-controlled interactive toys.

Kids love exploring bright colors and textures, listening to sounds from toys and playing with their toys to their hearts' desires. Kids relate to their toys and enjoy storytelling. Personally, I love stories and as a Disney-Pixar fan, I wanted to create something physical physical and mixed-modal.

My passion for design, tinkering, arts and interactive media resulted in this product. Inspired by Disney-Pixar's movie, Inside Out, that personifies the five major emotions (Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust) residing in the mind of a preteen girl named Riley, I created Interactiveety.

Leveraging that concept, Interactiveety is designed with materials that have different textures, forms and colors to portray different emotions. All these are designed keeping in mind the very nature of emotions apart from drawing from the Disney Pixar’s personification of emotions.

Decoding value

Interactiveety seeks to achieve a few things as shown in the diagram. In addition to these, by relying on haptics, it helps users understand properties of materials such as texture, composition, shape, weight and color through perception of sound and touch. For this, users will use their haptic perception along with kinesthetic sense to estimate the weight of the toy.

Haptic perception through manual exploration such as lateral motion, unsupported holding, pressure, static contact, enclosure and contour following allows us to learn about the characteristics of objects.

Future Scope

The future version of this project would be an interactive playset where users can record their own audio that played when interacting with a toy. Since it involves toy making, it can be used as a way to teach children how to build interactive toys instead of colorful puppets.

While the Lego Mindstorms that are set of kits that contain software and hardware allows users to create interactive programmable robots, soft and cardboard alternatives are left behind.

By incorporating elements from visual programming software and maker world, Interactiveety would be the perfect blend that bridges the gap between these and inculcate maker spirit in kids.