Project Name: ABC3 - A Design Concept For Pre-School Children
Skills: Creative Idea, Project Functionality Specification, Flowchart, Scamps, Finished Visual, Adobe Photoshop
Background: For my Interaction Design assessment I was told I would be designing outside of my 'comfort zone', meaning that instead of designing an interactive artefact for my own age range I would be dealing with a group that I hadn't previously dealt with before - pre-school children to be precise.
Before I was asked to sit down and begin designing from my brief, which was to create an engaging product to assist pre-school children to learn the alphabet, I was first instructed by my tutor Jim Davis to purchase and read an important book, 'How To Get Ideas' by Jack Foster which was aimed to take the mystery and anxiety out of the idea-generating process. It presented step-by-step guidelines to help anyone generate ideas, arguing that the reader must first condition their mind to become "idea prone".
After reading this book I set about designing my product;, I would have to use the three design tools in order to create a finished visual of the artefact (which would only be a visual concept, not a completed working model), these were the Functionality Specification, outlining the information which would be included in the product, the Flowchart, showing in which direction this information from the specification would flow and finally the Scamps which gave a rough visual to go by.
But before completing these three stages, which you can access and view by clicking on the links held within the 'Related Section' on the right-hand-side of this page, I first immersed myself in my target audience, I went around my local shopping complex to the pre-school stores, I picked up leaflets from these stores relating to toys used to teach the alphabet, I bought children's magazines and comics and existing alphabet games, I went on children's learning websites, watched children's cartoons and television stations such as CBEEBIES and after absorbing this rich information I let it 'incubate' in my head before 6-hours later, my idea was born.
I came up with the idea of teaching the alphabet in three different ways, using the 'Three M's', the Mic, which would be used alongside the product to teach the child to pronounce the alphabet's letters, the Mat, which would make use of existing technology to feature all 26 letters of the alphabet on a mat which a child would use to stamp on a particular letter when it would appear on their computer screen, which was designed to test their letter reaction and finally a Mouse would be used to learn to trace and eventually write the letters of the alphabet (for an extensive plan of my project download the Functionality Specification).
Click below to see my full completed visual created in Adobe Photoshop.
