WITHUS

2nd Place Judges
Designer(s): Taeho Wang, Minjoong Kim

WITHUS is the computer helping a preschool children shape the right values and human relationship by driving them into playing and learning with multi human interactions. Existing computer environment plays important and useful roles in various areas such as education, work, entertainment, and communication. However, it prevents direct interactions between two human or human and society. It is because current PCs are replacing the past human activities which need real contacts among people. It makes more difficult for young children to grow as an adult with right value and personality.
WITHUS solves the above problems of current PC environment. A kid as a user is attracted to enjoy more various and interesting contents with their friends by physically connecting his/hers with friends’ WITHUSes. Various firsthand experiences and collaborative activities through WITHUS promote the kids to grow as a social being by learning cooperation and compromise

Passion
It is necessary that growing children learn right values and thoughts, respect of different opinions, and diversity of society through various activities and interactions with other people, not with PC. However, though current computer environment is providing users with various and efficient functions, it prevents much more valuable direct-interactions with others.
The goal of WITHUS as the new paradigm is voluntarily bringing the kids together to play with. WITHUS provides computer environment where children can enjoy various and interesting plays and learn from it by physically connecting friends’ WITHUSes with his/ hers. Connection among WITHUSes drives users into direct interactions with others in real environment, not indirect interactions with others or between a user and PC in virtual environment. These direct and multi interactions driven by WITHUS play important roles for young children to build right values and better sociality.

Users’ Culture & Lifestyle
4 to 6-year-old preschool children grow both mentally and physically as they play with their peer group. According to many prominent researchers, as children play with friends, they develop cognitively, socially, and physically. They learn via exploration, trial and error, collaboration, experimentation, role-playing, and pretending. These have also been evidenced by the recent strong emphasis on play in the curriculum of U.S. preschools. However, the children surrounded by various digital devices these days grow not by going through cognitive process with direct and physical experiences but by experiencing virtual information. A study shows that these children tend to avoid direct relationship with others and fear trial and error.
Until today, technology has been providing only convenience without considering the relationship between users and in society. Now, it is the time that technology should promote users to interact directly with humans in real environment.

Market Viability
Nowadays, parents’ interest and investment in education for their children has been continuously growing. However, current products prevent the children from doing physical activities and direct interactions with friends which are critical to them in their growth period.
In this situation, WITHUS will be the innovative alternative of current child computers which gives both parents and children satisfaction and enjoyment. ‘Extension’ and ‘Share’ as the critical keywords of the concept will provide powerful market viability. Only with one unit of WITHUS, it fully functions as a child PC and appeal to the market, but various, interesting, and unique experiences provided by multi-connected WITHUSes will continuously induce consumers to purchase them, which increase the market share. Its functions of playing and learning with peer children and will not only appeal to parents but also the children’s education institutes which should provide quality education and play.

Size
Main body: 220mm x 220mm x 45mm
Stylus: 95mm (H) x 35mm (Ø)

Overview of Design
While the advanced technology has made the environment for children to play without friends, it has disconnected them with society. WITHUS is the child computer to solve the problem of current PC. WITHUS overcomes the limitations of current PCs by physical connection and disconnection. Easy connectivity among individual WITHUSes provides the most appealing environment for the collaborative plays such as board game, drawings, puzzle game, block stacking game, and so on. Also, easy transformation into polyhedral structures overcomes the limitation of current 2D display. According to the extended scale and structure, children are provided with more effective and innovative user environment for playing and learning.
In every disconnected WITHUS, contents including the process and result of today’s interactions and learning with friends are saved as history. Through the history, parents can share what their children have played and learned during the day and children with their children.

User & Context
The target users will be 4 to 6-year-old preschool children. Generally, the children in this growth period learn sociality through firsthand interaction with friends. However, the young children getting accustomed to playing only with PCs are becoming more and more individualistic or egoistic.
WITHUS solves the problems by providing the environment to voluntarily bring the kids together and play together. The stylus that comes with a main body offers the optimum product usability to children. Children can enjoy more various, interesting, and unique plays through connecting their WITHUSes each other. They can play various, creative, and collaborative plays such as drawing big pictures, playing puzzle games and board games on touch screen with the stylus. Once they are disconnect after finishing the play with friends, the process and results of games are automatically saved. After getting back home, children share their today’s activities with their parents.

Scenarios of Use
5-year-old Amy always carries her WITHUS whenever going to kindergarten. In kindergarten, she makes a big interactive digital canvas by connecting hers with her friends’ WITHUSes. She draws a big picture on it with her friends by using a stylus. After finishing it, they decide to play puzzle. The drawn big image is divided into pieces for a puzzle game. She cooperates with her friends and drags some pieces of image to place them onto the right position. To play block stacking game, she restructures connections of WITHUSes with friends into a cube.
After she gets back home, she brags about what she drew and the melody she made with friends by showing the screen of WITHUS to her mom. Through this, her mom can see how and what Amy plays and learns at kindergarten. So, she is very satisfied and pleased with the fact that Amy is growing and learning sociality interacting with friends. In bed, she has already decided to use pink color for roly-poly stylus as her marker in the board game.

User Interface
WITHUS is controlled by perfect touch screen and stylus. Children can draw pictures and write down characters on the screen with various colors by rotating the knob of stylus as they do with a set of color crayons and sketch books. The images on the screen can be move by hands or stylus according to the various games, with feedbacks. Also, it can be inserted and stored in the back of main body to prevent children from easily losing it. Rounded top of stylus gives easy and comfort grip to the young children who have not been accustomed to how to grip a pencil yet.

As for connections among WITHUSes, connecting bars automatically slide out from the body when two pairs of two sensors on each side contact together at the same time. They are disconnected by touching the buttons for three second automatically appears on the. All of the interfaces were designed as simple and intuitive as possible considering the characteristics of children.

Aesthetics
It is designed to attract children at a glance, considering its characteristic of child product. Its square display gives children more stable and toy-like friendly images. Comparing to adult products with straight lines, big curvature of four rounded legs on the back appeal children with interesting shape and provide them with stable use. Four edges of display were designed roundly, considering the children’s characteristics including that they don’t work on delicate tasks, can get easily hurt from sharp edges, and frequently drops and damages the devices. On the front part, no buttons and details are place to provide children a display as wide as possible.
The stylus with interesting shape like a roly-poly provides children with comfort grip and fun. The LEDs on the both ends and in the middle of stylus attract children to touch and grip.

Technical Aspects
The synchronizing technology of data and display among multiple WITHUSes is the critical technology, though most functions of WITHUS can be embodied with current technology. Due to the technology, data in a unit of WITHUS are naturally shown on connected displays and data produced from multiply connection with WITHUSes are automatically saved and perfectly retrieved in individual units.
Also, tangible interface technology, which makes it possible to drag and move images from one part of the display to another parts by hand or stylus on connected displays of WITHUSes, is essential. In addition, the accuracy of color and character recognition technologies by tracking the movement of the stylus is very important for WITHUS to perfectly function.

Ecology
If WITHUSes are widely spread, it would radically reduce the amount of consumptions of plastics and papers which have been used to produce current children products such as storybooks, sketch books, puzzle games, toys, board games, etc. It is because WITHUS replaces many of current children products. Especially, the amount of paper consumption can be reduced because WITHUS’ quality touch screen and stylus perfectly replaces the sketchbooks, notebooks, and crayons which are ones of most frequently used children products.

WITHUS provides no redundant or unnecessary functions and specs with children. Many current child PCs are just modified version of general PCs in terms of external design and size. In this case, overproduction of unnecessary functions and parts for children exerts a bad influence on our environment. But, due to its best suitability for children in terms of functions and specs, it will reduce the waste of resources without overproducing needless functions and parts.

Manufacturability
In terms of production, most of parts including external housing of main body and stylus body will be easily manufactured by using an injection molding method for mass production with rubber-coated ABS to protect it from friction or any impact that might happen. Also, on the back of main body, vents are symmetrically located for effective thermal cooling. Basically, WITHUS uses flash memory in place of the standard hard-disk drive. The use of flash gives three side benefits to WITHUS: much less power consumption, lighter weight, and less noise.

Source: Next GenPc