Last week, in the Alghero Faculty of Architecture, within the Design Course there was a workshop about Interaction and Sevice Design.
Professor Konrad Baumann and professor Gerrit Van der Veer made two parallels workshops on the subjects and both student from second and first year participated.
I followed the workshop led by prof Baumann and, together with my group (Barbara Carcangiu, Francesco Fogu, Eria Floris, Maria Chiara Sotgiu, Nicola Vargiu) we concentrated on kids and what kind of product should we develop for them.
We made interviews, developed personas and scenarios to understand what kind of product could benefit this type of user.
We found out that rather that using commercial games like LEGO or computers, young kinds prefer to play with rough material, common things. In addiction to that, interviews revealed that kind from different ages like to play together, helping each other.
This is very good from a social side, but if you think about the mess kids will make playing with paper, paint and sand, you will feel a little sad for the parents. Also for work like those is very difficult to make an archive of the child works, whitch is someting that parents and teachers are very interested in.
What we end up thinking about was a kind of digital interactive paper, that you can fold, carry out, attach with other and use as a high tech canvas. We didn’t bother about the tecnology that should be behind it, but on the experience you would like to provide to the user. Even if now such technology is not aviable, in 20 year it might be possible.
To develop the interface we realized different proposal for icons, colors and structure. Since the device would be very technological, we preferred to stay simple with the grafics. We started from emoticons-like icons and arrived to single-stroke images.
Disclaimer: the music (Nina Wall) is not our.
