Hi. I am Pallavi, a student of Visual Communication Design, from Srishti school of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India. This blog is a documentation of my Diploma Project. Please feel free to leave your comments and feedback. You can also follow me on twitter @pallavimanchi.
Panel: Anders Sandell, Sudipto and Ramesh
Ideas:
All your ideas are interesting and have potential to be developed into concepts and products. But they all now seem to need in various degrees a generation of the content for the game or toy.
You can choose to mould you idea as something that is more instinctive or more instruction driven. Work out your area of focus: is it going to be material, interaction scenarios or market testing for e.g.
If it is going to be a game, then remember that there needs to be a goal, an opportunity to achieve in the game. Engagement in the toy is when one finds that exact line of a sense of achievement and wanting to achieve. How long can you keep that hope of achieving alive? There is a repetitive pattern to this that children like, but the sense of reaching a completion keeps the engagement of the child. Don’t think in terms of the actual technology or product, but actually what’s happening to the mind.
At this point, different aspects of the idea need to be worked out like material, construction, interaction, safety etc. This will develop your idea into a concept.
It is important for you to touch base with material
Since kids have already been introduced to global trends in toys and games, introducing them to local toys is probably an important aspect you could look into
See how you could take different aspects of the ideas you have got, and incorporate it to your concept of the “bug heads”: for e.g. the combination of the physical board game is almost a natural process that can follow with the “bug heads”.
Some ideas can have an interesting potential to be strengthened using digital mediums, but you have to choose what you want to pursue, and pick it in terms of what you enjoy doing: you seem more of a hands-on person rather than a software oriented person, so you might want to work with that kind of process at this point.
User testing is very important at this point of time, and make sure you keep rapidly prototyping and testing with children: more than getting absolute detail through sketching, you might learn a lot more in the testing grounds.
Feasibility:
Each of your ideas are ranging from safe to risky in terms of finishing, and we are concerned that if you choose to take forward you helmet heads to develop it into a marketable product, it might be ambitious for the time left.
Choose and narrow down on your idea, and start working immediately. Write out a project plan and a timeline for this, and detail out what you aim for your final deliverable to be. You might need to fight tooth and nail to finish on time depending on what you choose, so choose carefully.
Presenting a digital concept for your toy might be risky for a final deliverable as it might leave a whole lot of questions unanswered in terms of feasibility. Whatever product you bring out by the end of the project needs to be made and shaped by professionals in the craftwork, and you cannot depend on your own skills to produce it.
Research:
Research and product need to tie up at the end of the project. Make sure that by the end of the project, there are good links established between the research and the concepts. It would be good if you could cite examples of personas and stories from your research that led you to design what you would have done.
