Plug&Play // Everything around you become instruments.

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This 4th year student project was realised in 2015, in the design school Strate, in Paris.

It is a connected object using a mobile app.

I hope you will enjoy.

Plug & Play is a school project realized for the Connected Object class at Strate – School of Design in 2015.

Our problematic, hereabove, delt with the dangers of connected objects. This school project lasted 2 months during which we had to create both the product in itself and the digital technology process it would rely on. We spent the first two weeks looking for useful data about connected objects and interviewing people we considered as potential target for our product.

Then we initiated both the mobile application and the 3D modelization of the product, here's our connected children toy called Plug & Play

As we were looking for the factors that lead to isolation via connected objects and – more generally – to digital technology, we found one particularly interesting information : as a child, the first interaction you have with one given technology influences greatly the way you consider its possibilities of evolution and the way you use it in the future.

Thus, we decided to meet parents and their children (between 5 and 8 years-old), and to ask them about their digital habits.

“Kids are living under house arrest.”

Most children under the age of 8 consider digital technology as an exclusively indoor activity. As few of them own cellphones, they either consider playing video games at home or going out with friends, but doing both generally seems unlikely

What if technology urged you to go out ?

“I only play video games or use Internet alone […] or with my friends.”

Technology is likely to become a gap between parents and children because very little interactions involving connected objects directly concern family relations.

What about going on an adventure together ?

“As they were born after 2000, my children know better than me

how to use connected objects”

Most parents feel like they don’t have the skills to educate kids about digital, they care about protecting them from inappropriate contents yet don’t know how to go further.

What if parents could help their children experiencing technology in a new way ?

Let's discover the concept !

Just a word about the app.

We decided to make a very simple application : Plug & Play is to be used by children, we wanted the interface to be very easily understandable whether you can read or not. Therefore, the user is guided step-by-step in the realization of his samples.

The idea, here, is that our users should not spend more than 3 minutes on the app so that they understand how their captured sounds will be used but still can spend most of their time playing music with the Plug & Play Machine.

Just a word about the machine.

The Plug & Play Machine is made to implement the sounds you have recorded to a simple musical composition. It is composed of a keyboard (enabling the user to activate the sample as if he was playing the piano) and 4 control buttons designed to create simple melodies.