Dream Toy

Mar 11

Written By Nicola YuenLam Law

RESEARCH METHODS

Interview (one-on-one)
Usability Testing

MEMBERS

Nicola Law: Research and
Digital Fabrication

TIMEFRAME

Feb 15, 2019 —
March 25, 2019

TOOLS

3D Printer, Laser Cutter
Adobe Illustration

SUMMARY

Dream toy is a co-design project with a four-year-old girl to build her dream toy, a digital moving house. Grounded constructionism theory, this project allowed me to be in the child’s shoes through a series of playful interviews and prototype testings, which helped me to witness a girl’s creative journey in learning and building with technologies.

This Robot Moving House was inspired by Maisie’s recent favorite robot, R2D2, and BBA. The base was mounted with a Gogo board, a speaker, and a power back. All functionality were programmed in the Gogo board interface in block coding. It comes with a bag of mini-furniture (used Adobe illustrator and laser cutter) and 3D printed characters that can be put inside the house. The house was made of acrylic, which Maisie could paint on it with dry markers. Concerning the safety for four-year-old children, I secured and mounted all the electrical components inside the base with screws and wires. To ensure the ease of use, I also programmed a remote controller.

Research Process

Maisie

This co-design project started with interviewing Masie. Maisie is a lovely and considerate girl who likes reading (particularly Peppa Pig), singing, painting and colorful stuff. She likes star wars characters and electronic toys, which were the Christmas decorations last year. The interview took place in her home. My colleague Sam, who would be interviewing Maisie’s brother, and I went to their homes when the siblings were about to finish their lunch. We knew the sibling for about four years and I think we got along pretty well.

Interview

Considering the contextual situation (they might not be able to dive into the interview phase after lunch), I played with Maisie in her book corner, where she showed her favorite books. She performed the songs that appeared on the storybooks. We stepped on a stuffed animal that has electronic components that can speak to us during this time. When she starts telling me, implicitly, she wants the toy to have a function that can talk/repeats her words. Though the whole interview time was about an hour, we did not spend the whole time for the ‘Q&A’ interview style. Instead, we did it playfully.

While we were role-playing and she improvised a song called the “Can Song” that she wanted her Dream Toy like R2D2 or BBA could repeat, “The Can is walking, and the Mustard, and and and Ketchup; and then they’re walking, Yay, yay, yay.” While I was thinking, she started showing me robot decoration. She scratched a robot “I don't know how to draw a robot-like R2D2, but you got the idea. I want the robot that can repeat me. Well, I don’t want anything complicated because I don’t want to make it hard for you”. Not until I was able to comment on it, she noticed some paintings, “I drew those. I like painting and colorful stuff”. While saying it, she showed a stuffed animal she likes – it could be folded into two sides, a panda or a dragon, and she added, “probably, the robot transformed. Or the animal can be inside”.

Prototype Testing

Gathered from our playful and interactive interview, I prototyped a moving robot with a cute bear with cardboard, just like the stuffed animal Maisie mentioned. She was pleased about that. I did not give any instructions in this usability testing session, as I wanted to observe the actual learning curve and user experience. When she played it, one of the robotic car wheels was not working correctly- either not moving or started coming off. She liked the bear on the top of the car and began drawing bears on the car’s body. I noted this behavior and thought it would be great to have drawing affordance in the final design. Maisie was also confused about making the car move and requested she wanted to have a remote control to start and stop the vehicle. After she played with the robot bear car for a while, she seemed to think of something and brought me to play with her new toy house. She told me, “I wanted a house that can move too, with the bear!”. In summary, Maisie wanted to have 1) a moving car that has sounds, 2) a house that can also move and detach/reattach from the car, 3) bears characters that can be either in the house or in the car.