KIKS IGNACIO
TAYO TENTS
Tayo Tents was a concept developed by myself, Lizzie Vaughan, He Zhang and Han-Ju Tsai back in spring 2014 for our Business of Design final project. Through research, we discovered how in our contemporary age of ipads and iphones, more and more, parents are becoming worried about their children engaging in “play” mostly through a screen and not through activities that really engaged them. It all culminated on a product that answered the need for creative, physical play in a time of modern technology. We wanted to offer something that gave both children and their parents the convenience of modularity but was still a "play-thing" that encouraged imaginative thinking.
PRODUCT RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
The initial challenge of the project was to find a "need" in our surrounding communities, there-after provide a service or product that fulfills this need. We decided to focus on the realm of families in the Bay area; the interactions between young working parents and their children, the challenges of finding time and space to play together, and the need to promote engaging play between parent and child. Tayo Tents was our answer to these issues - a put together tent using modular panels that are easy to store and open to imaginative building!
As part of the project, we were required to develop a business proposal that included marketing plans, trajectory schemes, and sustainable budgeting to maximize the reach of Tayo Tents.
Our final product and business strategies were heavily reliant on data gathering that we did through surveys, interviews, and multiple phases of prototyping. This project for me served as an educational dive into the processes of design research and product development - providing me foundational skills and insight that have molded my personal design process.
BRANDING AND MARKET
Once we had the product finalized for prototyping, it was a mater of packaging and branding the product to be marketable to the sphere of people we want to reach. Going with the theme of building and togetherness. We landed with the name "Tayo" which in my native language, Filipino, literally translates to "stand - upright" and "together". We thought it was a poetic name to represent what our product was promoting. The over all brand design would be composed of modular visual elements that mimicked the triangular panels that our product was composed of. These triangles would then adorn the product, packaging and branding we create, in fluid patterns and forms that draws our product's openness to play and building.
In the end, our project was well received by our panel of judges and even noted that we were being conservative with our sales projects give how well our over all proposal came out. I will remember this project with as great dive into design research and development especially being lucky to work with such an awesome team that I had!