Veni, vidi, vici

Three words. One goal. The phrase means “I came, I saw, I conquered” and right now, we are in the process of seeing. Toy ideas are difficult to come by when you’re trying to incorporate every element of everybody’s childhood, when you’re trying to come up with the ideal concept, when you’re trying to make the perfect product.

My name is Ian Pareja, I want to bring the joy of playing with toys and connect it to the vast world of technology and information.

My team and I had to come up with the idea, and we had to come up with it fast. Deadlines were coming up, obligations were getting in the way, schedules were conflicting, but our goals remained the same, our challenges remained in place, and we had to do everything possible to conquer our problems. Many of our problems revolved around the sheer vastness of ideas, many elements that could be incorporated into a toy. However, an even bigger problem was the fact that through all this sheer vastness of ideas, many of them have been demonstrated in one way or another through other toys or products.

Some companies spend millions of dollars into teams over the course of several months to formulate and execute a plan for fresh and unique toy ideas. This pressure was now being placed into the hands of a handful of college students. We had to overcome this by working diligently and efficiently.

We are in the stages where it is difficult for us to make ends meet, we are currently a small team of 4 students, so even if one of us couldn’t make it, that’s a quarter of the input we could have received, gone. Still, we met over the weekend. It was especially difficult due to it being Halloween weekend, and people being busy or going home, but Amihan and I were able to meet up and have Maria Skype in for the meeting.

We wanted to take the approach of using a simple idea and implementing several, more complex applications for that concept. The idea we had was to use the most elementary and fundamental idea of using basic shapes for the toy. My inspiration being the classic children’s toy of fitting block shapes into their respective slots. I also was inspired by the Baymax phenomenon, the fact that you could have a soft and tangible companion, but still have access to a plethora of information, albeit, Baymax wasn’t necessarily a toy, but we did draw some parallels between the toy world and him and incorporated those into our own ideas.

Right now, we are ironing out all the details, and hopefully we can recover from this slow start and progress strongly as a team. As a nod to the classics of the past, and a beckon to the potential of the future, we’re going to conquer this project.

Ian Pareja, Smart Toy Project X