Mimi

Sound design & Tangible interaction

Opportunity

Let children explore sounds, train their memory and discover the connection between sounds and patterns.

Sollution

Mimi is a tangible interface for children to explore sounds and related patterns. By using blocks, the user needs to recreate the sound sequences that the computer creates.

Contributions

In this course I was responisble for creating the physical prototype, designing a sound system fiting childerens ability to comprehend and disect sound sequences and creating the sounds used in the Mimi blocks.

Details

3 week project
Product and Interaction Design collaboration
Focus on sound design

Keywords

Connecting sound, pattern
Tangible Interface
Educational Toys

Team

Jelte Knossen
Hyunjin Shin
Robin Scholz
Lin Shen

Sound System

The difficulty of creating the soundsytem lies in creating a system that is intuitive, not too easy and not to hard for children to understand. By doing usertests with children that had musical education and children that had none, we aimed to test our first soundsystem with the use of the Wizzard of Oz technique. The aim of this technique is where you fake interactions in a way that the person doing the interactions has the real experience without making a working prototype.

The sequence mode plays the blocks one after the other one from left to right.

The parallel mode plays the blocks at the same time, increasing difficulty for the player.