Parents’ role is to influence children in a positive way.
If you reverse this assumption and you may invent something exciting. Like a smartphone game that turns kids into helpful back-seat drivers. The underlying idea is that kids can help parents to drive safely. By playing a game called Mr Bear Driver kids can learn about traffic safety and the game encourage them to tell their parents about safe driving.
Car journeys are from a kid’s perspective often long and boring and finding ways to occupy their minds is not always easy. This game is activated when the players are in a moving vehicle. Kids navigate a school bus full of animals in this game developed by the Automobile Club of Romania and Publicis Romania for the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile.
The school bus picks up passengers and points along the way to school. Now to the real exciting bit – the game replicates the speed of the car the kid is in by using GPS. So if the car is traveling to fast, the game prompts the child to tell the driver to slow down. If the driver does not slow down, the kid loses points and eventually the game. A fun game where kids learn about road safety and at the same time may influence the parents to stay within the speed limit.
Reversal assumptions about a particular subject area can lead to creative insights.Sometimes this creative technique can lead to wild and crazy ideas but sometimes you may hit on something that can be a real winner (crazy and wild ideas should always be explored, an initial suggestion is seldom the perfect solution and ideas can be improved upon).
The reversal technique helps you to escape from the “normal” way of looking at a problem. It may trigger new ideas and help you to explore the situation from a new perspective. It opens up new exciting possibilities and this approach may be particularly useful when you are developing new products.
Learning that excessive speeding is not a good thing is a great skill. What else can kids teach parents?
What can you reverse to develop a great game? Or to get ideas for a new product?