Kids Play is my Master of Arts thesis project from Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. In the thesis a music game for the iPad was designed together 52 children from the kinderkarten of Pajamäki, Helsinki. In the workshops age-appropriate co-creation and research methods were used for creating new ideas for the game. The workshop results were the basis for designing and developing the early stage game prototype into a finalized product. I have worked in the project as game designer and producer.

The designed game is a music game for 2 to 6 year-olds. It let’s your kids to explore wide range of music genres and instruments. The game will include 5 original songs with matching venues: balkan beat, electro, jazz, surf rock and hip hop. The game music and graphics are hand crafted with mixed techniques which gives a unique look and feel to the game. The game team wants to inspire the little ones to get excited about different types of music. The game will be available on the Apple App Store this summer.

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Download the thesis

The game team: Tuomas Ahva, Henna Luoma, Gökce Taskan, Juha Vaaraniemi and me

Mobile multi-player game prototype made for Nokia N97 touch interface. It was created during the Rapid Mobile Prototyping workshop at the Media Lab Helsinki. The prototype was made with Python for S60.

The goal of the game is to win a snowfight against the other player. You move the character by tilting the phone. You create a snowball by rubbing the right side of the screen and throw it by swiping the screen with your left thumb. The phones are connected via wi-fi and a server, so it’s a bit tricky to distribute the proto. Anyway it was a nice experiment in the world of mobile multi-player games.

The team: Juha Törönen and me.

End result of IXI workshop at Media Lab Helsinki. We trickered a ping pong table with some sensors and a web camera and changed the sounds of the game. Original idea was also to add visuals on top of the ball, but we ran out of time. Anyway it was fun to play!

The team: Lauri Kainulainen, Matti Luhtala and me.

Powderlove is a social online service for active downhill skiers and snowboarders. I came up with the original idea and then we made the service with a small team. The idea is to provide a place for snow enthusiasts to keep track of snowdays and to exchange experiences and stories with others. The site was launched in October 2009.

The first season was a quite nice success, but there is still things to improve. The team received a small fund from AVEK (The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture) for developing the service. We are coming out with a new and polished Powderlove for the winter 2010/2011. We will also launch the service internationally (it’s only in Finnish at the moment).

The team: Juha Vaaraniemi, Anssi Väisänen and me. Credits also for Linda Söderholm for great character design.

http://www.powderlove.com

The end result of a two-week Visual Concept Design workshop at the Aalto University School Art and Design. The topic was how people think about age and ageing.

The team: Tirza Ben-Porat, Hanne Huotari, Kalle Jokinen, Jian Li, Tapio Matilainen and me.

News Stumbler was an experimental visualization and an exploration of news topics and articles. It was the end result of the Dynamic Visualization Design seminar at the Media Lab Helsinki, Aalto University of Art and Design. It uses the metaphora of an ant colony where the ants are us the media hungry people, ants’ food is the news we consume and the ant trails are the connections between news topics we stumble upon.

The data consists of news topics and articles related to the initial search word. The related topics are fetched from Google search and the articles are from Google News. The results are scattered around the screen according to their relevance to the main topic.

After an ant finds a topic the topic and the ant will be colored according to which main path the topic belongs to. The more stronger ant path, the more news relate to the search word.

The team: Jonathan Cremieux and me.

This concept generation was a part of “Mobile User Experience Workshop” at Media Lab Helsinki which was organized collaboration with Nokia. Our team researched and conceptualized an idea for a possible game scenario using mobile projectors.

The team: Gokce Taskan, Ramyah Gowrishankar and me.