Zilan Zhou Design

Goku Goku

A water bottle designed for children.

2022 The Rookies Awards Final List

Product Design Category

Project Brief

Goku Goku improves user experience design by focusing on children's preferences and habits and solving children's water drinking problems. Most children do not like to drink water, except for unhealthy sugar-filled drinks. It is a common bad habit to start drinking water when thirsty, but thirst is already a sign that your body is dehydrated.

Dehydration can be very harmful to children's physical and mental development; for example; it can make them unable to concentrate well in class and perform poorly in sports.

The main design goal of the Goku Goku was to get children to drink water actively and drink enough. Finally, the word "Goku Goku" is a mimetic word from Japan that means gulping down a glass of water.

Opportunity

Even though parents are educated on the internet on how to make their kids healthier, they ignore the keys to being hydrated on time and drinking enough water, which are the most significant to health.

This is an opportunity to design a product from a children's perspective focusing on user experience and making the water drinking process more fun to influence children's hydrating behavior.

Ideation

Young children often enjoy playing with dolls, including baby and animal dolls. This is an important stage for them to "take care" of their own dolls to stimulate communication skills and develop empathy for others. It is also an important stage to "practice" how to take care of others. People have loved animals since infancy because of animals’ bright colors, mobility, and unpredictable movements. In this design, I thought about how to take advantage of this nature of children and encourage them to drink more water. Hence the idea is to enhance the child's interaction with the water bottle for behavior change.

Concept

Animal-shaped water bottle with a mini “game console” for digital pet raising.

Feature 1

Although the mini game console is not controllable by any buttons or touch screen, children can drink water to earn the pet "feeding food." If the non-contact level sensor inside the game console senses that the water level in the water cup has not changed for a long time, which means children have not drunk water for a long time. The bottle will sound like a "beep" alarm, and the game console will present a thirsty pet animation to prompt the children to drink water. The more water they drink, the more pets can be upgraded and unlock more animations.

Feature 2

Another highlight of Goku Goku is the interaction between users. Children can "clink glasses" with other Goku Goku users, and animation of pets interaction will appear on their small screens.