Background

In the beginning, a child is full of imagination. Children are good at simulative play, like using a wooden stick as if handling a sword, or using a cardboard box to make it look like a house. Today, however, you can easily get materials such as animated videos and toys. You can be exposed to an already-completed world without bothering to imagine it. This means fewer opportunities for children to engage in simulative play. Sheepme, a design company, sought a solution utilizing a designer's perspective in giving children more opportunities for simulative play and cultivating their imagination. But the company had to struggle with budget limitations.

Describe the creative idea (40% of vote)

To meet the client's request, we collaborated with the client and devised a special picture book for intellectual training based on a designer's perspective.The picture book, named CUBOOK, is designed to cultivate children’s imagination through simulative play.CUBOOK can be used in a simple way. Put a color cube on a picture and have a child guess what the color cube looks like with the picture. The development of the picture book was intended to cultivate children’s imagination by allowing them to draw, based on minimum information, a non-existent thing as if it exists.

Describe the execution (40% of vote)

"CUBOOK has very simple structure: just put a color cube on a picture and have a child imagine and guess what it looks like. For example, a same red cube may look different depending on which picture is next to it. ・Put it on a picture of a piece of shortcake, and it would look like a strawberry or a cherry. ・ Put it on a picture of sky, and it would look like the sun. The picture book is designed to be simple and eliminate character elements as much as possible, so as not to interfere with children’s using their imagination. Distributing the picture book to parents of pre-elementary school children required funding for commercialization. So we applied to set up a crowdfunding project through ANA wonderFLY, sponsored by All Nippon Airways, with the goal of collecting the funding to make and print the picture book."

List the results (20% of vote)

Set up an ANA wonderFLY crowdfunding project, gain support from CUBOOK fans and collect funding. We collected 103% of the funding target, commercialized the picture book, and launched it on the ANA WonderFLY online store. The initial lot sold out within a month of launch, leading to a reprinting. CUBOOK copies were successfully delivered to many households with children.