Stickychat (march 2006)
Stickychat was the result of a 2 week project that Nicholas Zambetti, Aurélien Tabard and myself developed in response to a second brief sent by Mattel for the third edition of the yearl Design Summit they organise. As with the previous years, a number of projects were selected to be presented to Mattel at an executive presentation in Los Angeles and Stickchat made it!
Stickychat is a play platform that enables children to use cell phones to record and play back messages using special stickers which they can collect or pass on secretly.
The idea behind StickyChat came from researching child behavior at an age when they are discovering their own identity and separating themselves from their parents. The need to form social groups separate from grown-ups is very strong, be it between neighboring children, classmates or best friends. Despite their drive to distance themselves from adults, they desire objects like cellphones and cameras that are indicative of adulthood. They wish to explore beyond the realm of parental presence and maintain an exclusive and special private domain. This leads to forms of coding in behaviors, language, written form and fashion that children develop to distance themselves from adults. This behavior was inspiring while designing Stickychat. We were interested in supporting this behavior and creating a tool for this sort of clandestine child subculture to exist.
News
We are submitting Stickchat to the Touching the Future competition and will hopefully have lots of nice videos to put up soon!.
