Open-Ended Sensory Play
Designed and developed by us at Colorbox Industries, these activity cards provide families recipes and play tips to encourage kids of all ages to engage in creative, open-ended, tactile exploration in the comfort of your own homes. We wanted to make the instructions clear and visual, to provide ideas for how to play without being prescriptive, and to make this information available offline to reduce screen time and to avoid the endless ads that clutter up websites.
what comes in the set
Each pack comes with six easy-to-follow recipe cards, general tips for open-ended play as well as tools and ingredients shopping lists. The recipes include: oobleck, cloud dough, rainbow rice, slime, playdough, and fizzy tray.
THE DESIGN PROCESS
As with all of our projects, we followed our three-step process (organize, visualize, and stylize) to streamline the creation process from ideation to a fully realized final project.
ORGANIZE
Once we chose the activities, we thought about what information needed to be on each card, and how to organize it. We needed 3 sections: 1) basic information like what you need, how long it will take, and how much it will cost 2) visual instructions on how to make it, and 3) visual ideas for ways to play after you’ve made it. We were focused on making these as easy to use as possible, so for example, we include the amounts of each ingredient in list format in the sidebar, but also in the instructions, so a user doesn’t have to cross-reference back and forth to know how much of an ingredient they need at the moment.
VISUALIZE
We knew we wanted these to be very visual so that children who can’t read yet can use them and participate. The instructions are illustrated, as well as the play tips.
STYLIZE
We wanted the style to be cute and approachable for kids. We also wanted it to be loose enough that it didn’t feel too precise or prescriptive so that there would be a lot of room for creativity.
Everyone Plays in Action
