The Making of Fisher-Price's "The Future of Parenting"

design thinking methodology

The Making of Fisher-Price's "The Future of Parenting"

Watch the Video Case Study

September 19, 2016
by Allison Ryder

Last summer, a Continuum project team boarded a plane to Buffalo, New York. Fisher-Price had asked us to help them imagine the toys and gear families would need for their children 10-15 years in the future.

A major goal of this engagement was to craft a highly shareable vision for the future (spoiler alert: this is it), so we were thinking from Day One about ways we might share the backstory when our vision went public.

Rewind to that first trip to kick off. It was exciting—I didn’t fully know what to expect. Of course, we had an agenda. We would talk about the project’s schedule and get to know each other (at Continuum, we refer to this phase of work as “alignment”), and then we’d start generating some ideas. That’s what was most interesting to me. How do our designers’ minds really work? Would I glean some insight into how we take the words of consumers and experts and turn them into real-world concepts? How would we anticipate future technologies? (This was a major component of the project.) Then, Continuum would head back to Boston to dig in, conducting secondary research about raising kids, talking to parents, and then designing. Along the way, we’d validate our ideas with subject matter experts, leveraging our global network of futurists, technologists, and innovators. Then…

Actually, maybe I’ll spare you the deep explanation of how we approached the Future of Parenting—you can hear it directly from our own Kevin Young and Lee Moreau, and client representatives Gary Weber and Kelly Lauber. They explain how we employed backcasting to set a future vision, and armed our client with the tools to work toward that future state as early as this year. They talk about the breathtaking work our team—design rockstars like Jen Ashman and digital gurus led by Bill Gastrock—delivered to make a fantastic future vision real.

We’re proud to premiere the video case study, “The Making of Fisher-Price’s The Future of Parenting,” here on our blog today. Give it a view to understand in more detail how an amazing group of individuals—with backgrounds in product design, projection mapping, architecture, engineering, UX design, and model-making—came together to help a legacy brand reimagine its future in a bold new way.

Embedded content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUvHIKUbQGE
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