children

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Opportunity: Using playful rehabilitation as a source of meaningful social engagement and empowerment for seniors after physical trauma.

Hippo is intended for seniors experiencing depression following physical trauma and their caregiving family. The focus is to promote creative interactions,  that move past memory loss, cognitive degeneration or challenged mobility using their remaining skills. The aim is to provide all the members of the caregiving family a means to understand what the senior is experiencing through their own body, as well as a new way to observe and understand the senior's needs through play.

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Beauty in Variety is a platform designed to bring awareness- and help develop the ability to articule- on the need of racial diversity in our lives. Made for parents with youung children, a book takes readers on an adventure with four children as they discover how much their lives depend on difference, starting with gentle topics like ingredients to bake a treat but building to the more complex subject of multiculturalism. An online portion accompanies parents on how to approach the subject so that no adult feels they are not adequately able to comfortably speak on the matter. 

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Project Tunnel Vision implemented several activities to see what does and does not work in co-creating with children. An activity booklet was tested, along with playground building with shapes and pieces, an obstacle course and fort building session in a gymnastics studio, as well as in-playground play and game making. Some activities were distracting, some outcomes were predictable, and some activities were very surprising. One thing was certain about the co-creation activities: that simply being around the children gave the design team immense insight into how they play and see the world.

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Project Tunnel Vision is an investigation into the contemporary playground environment. Upon exploring various problems with modern playgrounds it was learnt that children are not included in the design process, and when they were it was generally a token gesture. The purpose of this systems design is to put children at the front lines of the design process. By consulting children with a number of constructive activities, a context-specific design is created via community engagement. Once a playground has been designed by both the children and the design team, it is shown to the client and goes through several revisions by the client and children co-creation team.

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Burns Bog Tour is the proposal for an interactive guide to the Burns Bog in Delta. It uses games and short term goals (such as a scavenger hunt) to engage students in learning about the fascinating biodiversity and history of the bog, and includes features such as a backpack and journal for personalization. Participants of the tour would work towards leveling up, from dragonfly to bear, and would receive a pin with their accomplished level at the end of the tour.

The Burns Bog Tour for the iPad was developed by Jonas Bødtker, Marcela Huerta, Sarah Kozlowski, and Heather Neale. For the most part it uses current iPad technology, but would rely on as of yet non-existent camera capabilities to function.

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The Academy of B.C. Children's Hospital (ABCH) is a group project in collaboration with B.C. Children's Hospital that involves building a new framework for their existing website.

The design problem is that there is a massive amount of information presented in a rather dry and static way, and we do acknowledge that a hospital website needs to be highly informative. How could we present this material in a manner that encourages the interaction of exchanging and receiving this health knowledge within and outside the website? During the process, we came up with the idea that people learn the most through teaching, when they're reiterating their knowledge to other people. The final outcome revolves around the idea of sharing.

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  Melopad offers a different experience letting kids making their own music.    It comes with 8 colors of pads which produce 1 of the 8 pitches found in the major scale. The brain of this product is NXT and color sensors are used as the primary sense of device. The user assembles a personalized path. Using the limited number of tiles, user is required to form patterns creating the shortest routes to the right pitch. The concept is letting the user interact with music using the body; with movements such as walking, jumping and circling.

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Tesselo is a tesselating children's toy designed for dynamic play and sustainability.

Tesselo is a set of wooden puzzle blocks with characters. It can be used as a matching game, building blocks, or a puzzle game.

Materials and Production: using laser cutting and tesselating shapes to minimize waste and take advantage of scrap wood from larger industrial processes. The toy could be produced in any amount to create larger or smaller sets. The toy is painted with non toxic clay based paints and finished with food safe shellac.

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An ABC book for children which also appeals to their parents! 

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Zoop Toy Co-op is an alternative product system developed for the False Creek Community in Vancouver, BC. The development took place over an extensive process of co-design with the students at False Creek Elementary. We also developed a framework for assessing our potential environmental impact using the Okala guide.