What is your concept?

My main focus and direction will revolve around how sounds and color would affect our target audience’s moods and focus. The direction I intend to explore relates back to our core focus on having sounds and music in everyday interactions to promote learning, predominantly in a classroom setting.

Relating to that, my concept would consist of a playmat that can be used by children that omit calming music and colors based on color theory to help children relieve academic pressures and stress or simply to entertain them.

As our team management strategy was to develop four different concepts that fall under the same domain, my responsibility for this project is to develop and prototype my own concept while sharing ideas and research with the team, as we are all working on sounds ad sensor-based technology, we would be able to share resources and user feedback as a team.

What is the ideal finished product?

Ideally, my concept would be of a larger scale, an actual playmat sized prototype that is able to detect pressure and omit light throughout the mat and not just on certain pressure points.

My concept would also be more refined, with the possibility of using more sensitive pressure pad and slimmer Flexi led pads that will refine and reduce the thickness of the mat so that children playing on the mat will feel more comfortable. Ideally, the led strips will also light up at the pressure point, having the lights follow the child when they are interacting with the concept.

User Testing

In order to design my concept to accurately reflect the needs of the target audience, I drafted some questions to be answered by potential system users. However, it was difficult to find willing participant that fall in the specific age group I am designing for in these circumstances. Responding to that challenge, I decided to then include parents, educators, and anyone with childcare experience as research subjects. I was lucky to have some mutual friends in education to respond to a set of questions outlining how children react to technology use in classrooms, color, and music associations. These interviews were conducted to have a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

results can be viewed here :

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P-88CwLs07s8fiTsA6cLBqv-gTZ115bI/view?usp=sharing