Young Designers 2011

		Young Designers 2011
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Sumit Pandey | i.sumitpandey@gmail.com

Book-Nook: Interactive Environments for Pre-school Children

New Media Design | PGDPD
Guide: Dr Jignesh Khakhar
Sponsor: Self-Sponsored

Keywords
Designing for children
Co-Design
Children's Museums
Installation Art

Book Nook, a proposed space inside the Oslo Barnemuseum, aims to enable children to learn existing well-known stories and build their own stories by blending their knowledge with their imagination. As an Interaction Designer I was required to work with children aged 4-6 years to develop installations for the proposed space. I designed and prototyped two installations — Footprints and Storylog.

The Footprints installation comprises a series of blocks that function like pages in a book. These pages have connectors that enable the child to connect them along three dimensions. Each page has a fixed character that is stuck on its surface and free characters that can be moved around. These characters are based on the popular children’s stories, Muldvarpen and Hansel and Gretel. Footprints’ boards were prototyped using the Arduino Platform.

Storylog is an interactive installation that consists of a reactive surface designed in the form of a tree-trunk. The walls around Storylog create the environment for the story. The installation favours collaboration —children can come together on a single surface, move their characters, exchange them and build upon each others’ stories. The video storybooks created on Storylog can be screened on the walls as well as played on a personalized microsite on the museum website. This installation was prototyped using Reactivision Software and Processing.

The project gave me the opportunity to work on an important aspect of design — design for children. I learnt immensely from the process of understanding how stories are created and exchanged by children and working with them to produce a design that was coherent.