Club Ex

This week we focused on the experience of joining a club. 

What new and original club might we invent and how could we make it a really good place for kids (real or virtual)? This is designing an experience in an organization and it requires the kids imagine themselves in that club. 

First step: design a name and logo. How about the Ninja Club? 

Or the combination Alice in Wonderland Tropical Club with a cheshire cat beach ball? 

Brochure Warning: "Only come to our website if you suffer from nightmares or crazy ideas. May be pictures of things that will make you have a heart attack because you are laughing so hard".

Next step: how to promote the club? Some kids made paper prototypes of websites. This is a practise that some web developers use to first discuss a web design with their clients. By stripping away the moving graphics of the computer, it's easier to focus on the information that the user might need. Other kids designed brochures. Both items involve layout and content design.

At the kids' shopping club, members are given an allowance and meet up at popular stores to shop til they drop. Subsidies are available for kids that need them.

At the food club, young people collaborate to decide on  a menu, cook it and then share interesting and new tastes with one another.

At Bugs R US there is a fully equipped nature centre. Kids are taught how to handle the bugs with care and may also see local reptiles and birds.

These students worked on a system of secure membership cards for the tech club with fingerprint ID.  

Toddler Time

"Nurturing our kids true potential isn't about making sure they reach some predetermined standards, it's about helping them develop the skills they need so they can create a life that is meaningful and satisfying to them"         

                                                                Eileen Kennedy-Moore, psychologist and author

Our first workshop was a riot of colour, texture and playfulness as we designed toys for babies and toddlers. Out of mounds of material emerged a squid clan, a rotating furry thingamajig, a play dashboard (complete with turnable knobs, steering wheel, ignition knob and clutch!), a kick-mobile, a disco dish, a twistable octo-cone and catching cup and a bouncy fur pet.

These are prototypes -or model designs. The kids have taken this open-ended challenge and invented toys with the senses in mind. In this first class, we let the kids think with their hands. We want them to turn their ideas into something tangible and to get comfortable with a wide range of materials.

In our demo time, everyone did a great job of saying what they liked and what they could improve about their designs. We also talked quite a bit about how these models would have to be adapted in the real manufacturing world, to make them safe for little kids. Some of the boys wanted to know how and when they could start production.

This class introduces the kids to the concept that inventions and designs are for someone: the "user". When we're designing for someone else- it's a good idea to think about who they are and what they need or want. Better still ask them! The students had a lot of enthusiasm for this project because many of them have little sisters and brothers. So in this case empathy and understanding of the user come naturally.

"my brother would love this squid, but he might pull it apart!"

"a toddler would love this because it spins and it's furry"

Parapan-Am 2015

With the Parapan-American Games coming to Toronto this summer, we asked our Invention Squad to design a game for teams of blind players and one participant in a wheelchair. In creating a new sport, we're not making an object, we're designing a working system.

In order to better understand the constraints of this task, we had a Q and A with guest participant: John Willis. John is an inclusive designer (meaning he designs with people of all abilities in mind) and is also blind himself. He talked to the kids about what sports are fun for him to play and what things he tries to avoid at all costs (fast moving balls, tall hard obstacles).

With these user constraints in mind, we brain-stormed to come up with a blended game. We had lots of ideas as a group. Elektra and Zachary thought of a flag capture game, where the wheelchair participant has five flags and two teams of non-sighted players try and find the flags, with directions from two sighted guides. We test played this for two rounds.

When users test a game it is really obvious what works and what needs improving. Overall the verdict was that this game was quite fun, but that:

• The flags need to stick out from the wheelchair all in one place (to avoid the crazy groping)
• There should be some way of limiting the amount of time a blind person can touch the chair  (same reason as above). Maybe a ref is needed to enforce this?
• There needs to be a way to slow the wheelchair down -or maybe there should be multiple wheelchair participants (to "confuse it up" some more)
• The flags could be different textures for the two different teams
• There might be blind people with flags (should these guys also be able to get flags)?
• Our guest designer, John pointed out, that we might want to modify the game so that the blind participants have more autonomy i.e. they are experiencing the game through their own senses more. 

Round one of prototyping done. Lots of great design modifications by our young inventors.