project research summary

Project research summary and concept description

Demographic

Young family with children under 8 years old

The Future PredictionOLED display, wireless connection, Smart system, these new technology will bring a revolution to home entertainment devices. People will still have a large TV for family use, but at the same time, portable sized smart TV will also appear for personal use.The future home entertaining system will have a wireless hub that connect to all sorts of information resources, such as internet, DVD and PC, then transmit visual information to the Large TV and portable devices wirelessly.

New OpportunitiesCurrently most TV exist in living and dining room. But with the portable sized device, all the rest of areas become possibilities.

In modern houses, each area has its own functionality. But as open house plan becomes popular everyday, the boundaries between these areas are blurring. So between parents and children, their everyday activities are definitely overlapping to each other. That forms an interesting situation.

The overlapped activities between parents and children can be grouped into 3 major sections: children education, home entertainment and family socials. As today parents are paying more and more attentions to their children, that makes home entertainment and child education are integrating into family socials.

That means there need to be a lot of interaction going on between parents and their children. So the portable smart device becomes the perfect tool to encourage this interaction.

The interaction between parents and children is actually a 2 way interaction.That includes control from parents to children, such as how long they can watch the TV. And request from children to parents such as support for their homework.It requires the smart device can be physically controlled by parents, and easy to let children to use.

As a piece of furniture, in order to support the portable smart device, it should satisfy needs of both parents and children, and at the same time, encourage the interaction in between them.

Design Challenges