Gru
Gru aims to act as a subtle catalyst for conversation between parents and kids by using home gardening as the focal point.
Scope: Product Design, Digital Design & Visual Identity
Timeline: 4 weeks
With the pandemic forcing young parents to work from home, their entire work-life balance went for a toss. This resulted in simple leisure activities like chatting and connecting with the family, especially children, taking a back seat.
Both the parents and the kids have their own set of pain-points.
To start off with, I asked my peers on social media about their memories of spending time with their parents, as kids. The intention was to look for inspiration.
I was able to categorise the ideations into the following:
Doing things together - comprises of spending time of doing some activity together at the same time
Chores - gamifying daily chores to help out parents
Bridge - parent and kid participate in the activity at different times, but they bond over it
The aim was to create a solution that does not become redundant after a period of time.
Therefore, I chose to add gardening as the focal point.
The solution takes into consideration all the categories of ideations.
The day-to-day tasks of taking care of the plants is taken care by the kid using the "Gru" device. The parents monitors the progress from their phone and get notifications prompting them to synch Gru to the app and check out the progress with their kids, with subtle prompts encouraging them to talk about specific plants.
The weekends are reserved from more elaborate tasks that are suggested for the family to undertake together.
Weekday scenario: "Chores" and "Bridge" ideation philosophy
Daytime
The kid uses Gru to monitor and respond to the needs of each plant, while the device simultaneously collects and stores individual plant data.
Evening
The parent receives notification on their phone which triggers further interaction and ultimately conversation.
The Gru App shows the overall data of all the plants in the garden and keeps a log of the activities.
Weekend scenario: "Doing activities together" ideation philosophy
Apart from the daily activities, the parent(s) receives a notification suggesting new activities to undertake with their children. The goal is to trigger an activity and family interaction, and for the application to subsequently take a back seat.
In the explore section, activity suggestions are made that keeps getting updated based on seasons, location and specific plants in the garden.
The profile section contains the family details, badges, provision to synch the device to the app and details of connected phones.
The Gru device can be paired with more than one phone so that multiple family members can monitor progress. It's also more helpful when one family member has to leave temporarily.
Visual Identity
The visual identity was meant to evoke the energy and playfulness of childhood and the joys of spending time and doing anything with loved ones.
Future scope:
There is scope to implement gamification more extensively to make the experience more engaging. There is also an opportunity to turn it into a brand with a range of products like educational planting, goodies, etc.