Veggie Touch is a creative play Toy that can create any kind of music using Makey Makey (allows you to turn anything which conducts a small amount of electricity into a controller for your computer) and real vegetables. Touch the veggies and explore music!

Project My Role Duration Tools

Academic Project (Team of 3) User Research,Ideation, 3 Weeks Makey Makey, Laptop,Alligator cables,

Prototyping, User Testing Usb cables, Foil, Vegetables,

Challenge

Veggie Touch is a creative play Toy that can create any kind of music using Makey Makey (allows you to turn anything which conducts a small amount of electricity into a controller for your computer) and real vegetables. Touch the veggies and explore music!

Project My Role Duration Tools

Academic Project (Team of 3) User Research,Ideation, 3 Weeks Makey Makey, Laptop,Alligator cables,

Prototyping, User Testing Usb cables, Foil, Vegetables,

Challenge

To design a toy for college students to play between classes by utilizing play concepts to create engaging and insightful user research methods.


Playful User Research

To inform our toy design, we conducted research among the user group (college students).

Contextual Inquiry - Create Questionaries that involved type of ‘playful’ activity.

Ask Questionaries

1. What do you like to do in your break time between classes?

2. If you got 5 minutes and would like to do some activities, which activities do you prefer?

3. Do you like to play in between classes?

If yes , Any play objects which you prefer?

4. What kind of toy do you prefer to play in your break between classes?

5. Can you tell me something about your most playful experience with toys in recently?

Results  - Focus on MUSIC with creativity

Most students answer were they would like to listen to music between classes 4 of 7 people mentioned music instruments as play objects and 2 mentioned board games and puzzles as play objects.

Analysis + Ideate

Based on our data, we analyze our results and then began ideate.Since most of the participants choose Music as prefreed object, hence we tried to use objects for a toy that incorporates music.

Select Play Objects + Hopscotch

Xylophone

Water Bottle with Chopsticks

Carrot as Music Instrument picture

Micro coprocessor with LED and music

Headphone

Balloon

Toy(Snake)

Questionaries:Please choose your favorite playful object.

Why did you choose it?

Summary: Most of the students chose the xylophone as their favorite playful object.Few students chose the balloon, and carrot as their play objects.

Why did you choose it?It’s the most colorful object (Carrot,Ballon - Colorful object ) and Xylophone can simply make music with it.

For our creative play type, all our findings pointed towards a toy that incorporates music.Hence, after ideation we decided to include Makey Makey as Music Creator . Colorful Objects:Veggies & Balloons into our design as it can be creative and playful.

Prototype and Testing

We tested if real veggies are conductive and of which most of the vegetables acted as a good conductor.

  • Makey Makey and Alligator Cables tested using Laptop.

  • USB cable used to connect laptop and Makey Makey

    Our Results and Prototype Iterations Video

  • https://youtu.be/FG9ZeA_YJLA

    Results - Students enjoyed playing with our Veggie Touch. They found the combination of music and veggie interesting and spent almost 5 minutes playing.Veggie Touch enhanced group participation.

    • Increased more participants’ engagement after each iteration.

    • Successfully designed playful experiences for 20 students.

    • Participants were interested to play with Veggie Band during their break time.

    • Participants thought the idea with real veggies creative and fun. 

    Future work

    • Further research needs to be done to check which type of instruction is easier to understand for participants as our video and written instruction was little time consuming.

    • More testings need to be performed to check good conductive veggies.Onion and potato connection was weak, participants had to tap on them harder to play music.

    • Coded music or special sound effects could be implemented as we used combination of 8 music instruments.