TAMAGOTCHI
UPDATE
The purpose of this project was to take the classic toy and breath a bit of fresh air into it.
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My focus for the update was to make the product more accessible and disability-friendly. This meant tackling problems such as its grip-ability, hard-to-press buttons, and poor readability.
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Solutions included increasing the size of the entire product slightly, adding rubberized, adding over-molded grips to the sides, increasing the size of the buttons, and adding a backlight to improve the legibility of the LCD screen.
4 weeks
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Solidworks
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Keyshot
2nd Yr.
Solo Product Development
This project also served as a lesson on manufacturing.
Needing to consider injection molding constraints added a fascinating challenge.
If I was to open this project back up, there are a lot of sharp corners I'd like to knock out, to say the least.
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At the start of the process, I took apart and analyzed the assembly of the original Tamagotchi to better understand how my intended changes could affect the design.
Exploded View
As the product gets an update, it made sense to give the packaging an update too.
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Not a lot of research going into it, so the design choices are fairly uninformed. An aesthetic concept.
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Major design elements being the pink/blue checkerboard pattern from the screen background, and the simple pixel art characters.
PROCESS
To start, I had a Tamagotchi. I used it for a while and noted my complaints. Online reviews were also helpful in establishing the main issues. From there, an accessibility perspective was considered.
Sketching and 3d modeling were crucial in the development.
