Mar 10, 2008

Dance the recess away

Stanford grad student designs game to fight child obesity

By Kristina Peterson / Daily News Staff Writer

When Stanford University design graduate student David Ngo wondered how to get kids to exercise, he immediately rejected the adult solution - the gym.

"It's almost the worst model possible. A treadmill? ... It is so boring - you're a mouse on a wheel," said Ngo, 27.

So Ngo took thought about what would be fun and socially acceptable - "you don't want to have the boring birthday party" - in fashioning a product that today has earned him a semifinalist's spot in the online Ruckus Nation contest.

The new competition, sponsored by the Redwood City-based nonprofit Hope Lab, aims to generate ideas for products to fight childhood obesity, said Fred Dillon, director of product development.

"Our mission is to develop innovative products that help kids with a variety of chronic illnesses," Dillon said. For this contest, he added, "we really wanted to get new products that would get kids moving."

Ngo's entry is a game called "Scoot," which he describes as "musical chairs, but with lights."
Participating kids hook up an iPod to a small device that plays music for a dance party while a central "disco ball" projector shoots out colored lights. When the music cuts off, a voice calls out a target color - "Scoot green!" - and enough dots of green light appear for all but one of the players to tag. The one player eliminated each round can still participate in the dance party, Ngo noted.

"It had to be first fun, personal and social," Ngo said, as well as "portable enough so you could bring it to a sleep-over."

Ngo, a former aerospace engineer and now a student at Stanford's Joint Program in Design, designed the product in less than a week, after he woke up one morning with the idea.

"I always wanted to be a toy designer growing up," he said. But first, the Harrisburg, Pa. native studied aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later at Stanford and spent several years as an unfulfilled engineer whose creativity was funneled into the indie rock band he played with on weekends.

So last year he returned to Stanford to study product design. Many of his designs focus on incorporating the idea of "play" into adult objects.
"I thought about the perspective of the naughty child," Ngo said, explaining a table he designed and built that "looks like a romantic dinner for two." But set on a rotating spindle, with all the pieces glued on, the table can be dramatically overturned for a grand flourish, with none of the clean-up.

To serve a more practical purpose, Ngo designed a translucent sake carafe that lights up from the bottom so drinkers know how much of the beverage is left.

His general design philosophy, Ngo said, is to "try to stay out of Sky Mall."

Ngo remains in the running for the competition's top winners, which will be announced at a public event in Golden Gate Park on March 17.

Hope Lab, whose first product was a video game called Re-Mission for kids with cancer, plans to try turning between two and five of the contest entries into prototypes that may later be developed into actual products, Dillon said.

"One of our guiding principles that informs our work is to 'lead with fun and help will follow,' " he said.



E-mail Kristina Peterson at kpeterson@dailynewsgroup.com.