Childish — A digital plate for children to eat food right! | Advanced Product Design

Project By: Tejas Sarvankar, Hemantkumar Das, Stacy Carvalho, Pooja Doshi, Reju Roshan

Our Journey with Childish began 10 weeks ago with a design brief that was simply articulated yet complex to interpret, “merging Hi-technology with low-tech manufacturing processes.”

We were further explained that breakthrough innovation is sometimes found at the crossroads of two opposing ideas. For eg. Soft but hard, compact but spacious (disk drives), etc.

The process we were told to go with was:

Research > Idea Generation > Development > Delivery

On first thought, we had practically nothing. It was a challenge to merge the two while keeping both true to what they really stand for. We then decided that we could begin by searching for only low manufacturing processes present today.

We listed down a couple of manufacturing processes from cooking to baking, sewing to shoe manufacturing and so much more.

We finally decided to narrow down on cooking but our original source of inspiration was Athangudi tiles. Athangudi tiles are basically cement tiles like a mosaic, but unlike the machine pressed and produced mosaics; they are handmade over glass surfaces. In designs, finish, quality, and durability, Athangudi tiles can compete with any of modern manufactured flooring materials.

Although given a linear process, we realized the path to innovation is most definitely not the same.

Food being a broad category, we went further to narrow it down to our stakeholders when it comes to food. That being, everyone. We decided to focus on 3 main areas, kids, bachelors, and healthy yet fast cooking techniques.

Primary Research:

In order to understand the on-ground reality of problems with food, we decided to talk to some parents, kids, chefs, and a couple of psychology experts.

To go ahead and validate the findings from our conversations, we decided to conduct some surveys. These surveys were passed along several groups of stakeholders including kids.

Insights

1. “We eat with our eyes, FIRST” Eating is a necessity, necessity is routine, the routine is boring. What if we make it fun? Current Manipulative techniques used by parents People subconsciously form a notion of probably how good the food could taste by the looks of it. This point could be used as leverage to make boring food interesting.
2. Junk for both kids and adults, but healthy only for kids! adults have a lot of varieties to choose from when it comes to both healthy and junk food. But that is not the case with kids. With increasing trends of visiting restaurants, and eating healthy food being an adult activity it is a wrong example being set for the kids. There needs to be more fun encouragement for kids to consume food, even if it means its fruits and vegetables.
3. Eating is a necessity, necessity is routine, the routine is boring. What if we make it fun? People, especially kids, refrain from eating food sometimes or are picky because the process of consumption of food is pretty boring. It is necessary that one enjoys food while eating it to make the most of it.
4. Current Manipulative techniques used by parents. It’s difficult to feed growing kids and to deal with their constant tantrums. It takes a lot of patience, effort, and time to sometimes feed them one portion of a meal. To avoid these parents have used easy manipulative methods to combat this problem. They include screen eating, bribing with junk and sweets, peer pressure, fear, compulsion and sometimes let them just be. This creates a lot of health-related problems for kids in the future.

Ideation

The phase of ideation was amongst our favorites. We had a chance to play and fail and learn from those failures. We experimented with all sorts of fruits and vegetables, with them being our main target. We used the Robinhood method of ideation - to come up with maximum ideas in the least number of time.

Idea Generation using Round Robinhood method

We went berserk with trying to actually feed kids only junk food with all wrong habits and studied the consequences of that. We tried experimenting with indigenous games and food compiled like the Rubik’s cube. Our main plan was to try to get on page with why healthy food wasn't fun!

A few of our finally presented ideas were:

Fruit Jelly

Kids love desserts more than they love food. Figuring out a way to make them eat fruits without a fuss can also be a huge task at hand. Entertainment is the key to getting them into eating food easily. While trickery is great to manipulate them. Luckily, jelly is such a fun dessert to make and the possibilities of what goes in the jelly are endless. It jiggles and looks extremely captivating. It can also come in various shapes, sizes, and forms. Our idea was to make it as entertaining as possible by adding fruits and vegetables in different shapes, and keeping the jelly clear so it also creates the illusion of the fruits floating in mid-air. It also tricks the children into thinking that they are eating just a dessert while in reality, he’ll be eating healthy fruits.

Wiggle spoon

There’s a natural tendency in children to do things they shouldn’t be attempting to do. The satisfaction gained from achieving something that initially wasn’t meant for you is what drives them to get it even more. This psychological fact is where this idea the wiggle spoon was derived from. The wiggle spoon is a simple concept with a twist. The spoon head remains the same but the body of the spoon has a snake-like structure. It works just like those rattlesnake toys we had as kids that switch sides in its movement with the slightest movement in your hand. The wiggle spoons functioning was such that if the child refused to look at the spoon and concentrate while eating it would move and switch sides making it compulsory to look at spoon while eating.

Foodopoly

Another of our ideas was based on the game of monopoly. A concept that involved all parts of food preparing, cooking, garnishing, and eating. All this coupled with family mealtime which has become an alien concept would distract people from their screens to a family fun time. The concept of money and banks would be replaced by barter system and supermarkets. The board would be divided into three aspects, thereby also introducing cooking to every family member. The game was also based on the ingredients already available at home. On realizing this would remain a novelty for the family we decided to go back a few steps.

The idea of the modern age dining table came from its losing importance, as we have shifted our meals to the living room in front of the TV. The dining table using computer vision could identify the ingredients on the plate and narrate a story to the kid while he or she consumes the food. This was to create a sense of value for food that would last them in their adulthood too. Along with that, the table came in with features for adults where on placing the plate on the table they could know the nutritional content of their entire meal. We eventually realized how distant and overwhelmed the kid could feel because of a huge stagnant object that spoke to him or her. Hence we figured we needed something that was only for the child and less overwhelming.

Final Idea/Concept

Our final idea of the plate came from the simple fact that what is the most portable yet an everyday part of our eating routine - PLATE. That's when it occurred what if the plate itself could be designed in a way where the kid knows how much to consume, how to consume and at the same time have fun eating all his food, healthy or not! The inspiration as mentioned before was always athangudi tiles- an indigenous art form. So we also looked for indigenous and fun together.

That's when we landed on our old Nokia 3310. Even during that age of technology, we had fun playing snakes on that phone. We thought of leveraging that in a way that would not distract the kid but use the technology to the advantage. Therefore we were pretty sure to let food be the controlling factor of the entire digital game on the plate. We wanted it to have certain accountability and hence an app through which parents could monitor the nutrition consumed.

Product Development - Features

1. You Eat Fast, You Lose Faster!

The faster your child eats the quicker they lose. ‘Childish’ is designed to encourage your child to eat at the right speed during the given time. This feature of the dish makes sure the child finishes the morsel within a said number of seconds but without rushing the process making sure they extract every bit of the nutrition value without nibbling at or gobbling their food. Eating hastily automatically deducts points and also increases the speed of the snake which increases the chances of losing…they wouldn’t want that.

2. Healthy Food is what they want!

Feeding kids healthy food can be such a drag! What if they voluntarily chose to eat healthy though? The point system of ‘Childish’ is unique as the food detection feature grabs what food is healthy and what isn’t and scores the healthiest food with the most number of points. It also subconsciously makes the kid associate greens, veggies, and fruits with positivity!

3. Concentration helps beat the competition.

Kids don’t listen to mommies but surely hear their friends out! ‘Childish’ lets the child connect with his friends via an app where they can view their scores on the leaderboard. Following the instructions allows them to reach and be the top scorers. This motivates them to follow the rules making them eat mindfully.

4. Food Time is always fun!

Games were always fun. ‘Childish’ takes inspiration from our old games and incorporates it with current trends by letting the child choose an Avatar to play with. Along with achievements to unlock and also become stronger at every stage making sure that this dish is his companion all along!

5. Choose the favorite character

To keep the kids constantly engaged and never get bored with the plate and the games, they were given some additional characters. Depending on their speed to master the art of eating the food, these characters would get unlocked, hence encouraging them to keep working hard.

To view the full project visit: https://www.behance.net/gallery/95862095/CHILDISH-Make-food-fun-for-kids-%28UI-UX-Prod-Design%29

Physical Aspects

Consideration of the shape and size was given for the most ergonomic option for the kids. For the plate to be used for liquids as well, it has been given a little more depth as compared to a normal plate. The side is a little curvilinear to avoid spilling or thrusting of the plate. Overall the plate resembles the cross-section of an apple.

Technology integration

1. The body of the plate will be made of melamine which is completely child friendly, durable, fire and heat resistant, and also shatterproof.
2. The surface where the food is placed will be made of a tempered laminated glass which is integrated with the capacitive touch panel, This gives the data about where the child touches on the part of the plate.
3. Beneath that is a multi-color LED display unit which gives digital data output.
4. Next is a pressure sensor pad which is used to map the pressure observed at various parts of the plate. This is also used to detect where all have the kid place his hand on the plate.
5. It is also supported by a weight sensor that observes the weight loss occurred on the plate.
6. All these data gathered by the capacitive touch panel, pressure sensor, weight sensor goes to a processor unit, which gives the output to the LED display. The child when touches the plate it detects with the help of a capacitive touch panel and pressure sensor pad, once the processor understands if there is some weight loss in the plate it sends the digital output to the LED screen.
7. These all are powered by a 5V 1000 mah Li-ion battery which can be charged by a 5V wireless charging coil module.

Manufacturing

1. Childish’s body is made of melamine which is made in a hydraulic mold.
2. The surface where the food is paced is made of glass which is manufactured by die casting process and then is subjected to quenching process so that glass is tempered.
3. Then the wireless charging coil is assembled first followed by battery, processor, weight sensor, pressure sensor pad, and then the tempered glass with a capacitive sensor. Then the glass is pushed gently where it locks automatically with the clips inside and gets sealed.

Learnings

Our journey started with a simple statement to a high-end product in a span of weeks. While looking forward to a linear process we realized, no process is truly linear. Learning new insights from our conversations meant validating them and then going back to validate some more. We went back and forth, especially during the ideation process, the failures during this process made us realize gaps in our findings and helped us redirect our focus to where the real problems are. Finally leading us back to the beginning of our problem statement with a well-rounded solution.

What’s Next?

Although we did verify the idea with the kids and their parents' our next step would be developing the product and getting it tested by all the children we dealt with. Fixing any bumps in the road with regards to the technology and developing the app as well.