narrative
product
experience
Aquablocks
Year
2025
Role
Product designer, hardware engineer & AI developer
Team
May Choy
Type
Physical Human-AI Interaction
Immersive Environment
Recognition
Muse Design Award Silver
UX Design Award 2026
IF Design Award nominated
The project aims to showcase the beauty of the ocean, sparking curiosity and a desire to protect it.
Most tools remain abstract and distant, leaving children distant from the cause. Our project creates a journey where a child begins by building marine creatures with blocks, then sees them animated in AI-generated ocean scenes.
Problem
Our users are children aged 5–10. What we found is that most current educational stories are top-down and predetermined, offering little space for imagination, while many AI story machines deliver finished narratives that replace children's voices. This limits memory, empathy, and lasting engagement.
Target User
By letting children build their own creatures and stories, our project makes learning playful, creates emotional bonds with marine life, and helps them truly care about ocean protection.
User Experience
The experience unfolds in three stages. Children first assemble modular blocks to design their own ocean myth creatures. The system then recognizes each creation and maps it to a matching habitat. Finally, an AI-generated environment unfolds around the creature, shifting through Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, where each child is both maker and storyteller of their own marine world.
Innovation
AI should not be a replacement for human creativity. Instead, it should serve as a powerful tool to bloom human imagination. AI here becomes a co-creator to support children's narratives and creativity rather than automating them, offering an inclusive model for educational tools.
The core component of Aquablocks consists of 10 ocean myth creatures, each represented by modular blocks. These blocks are divided into 2-3 parts, each part being magnetically connected to allow for free assembly. This modular design enables children to create various marine creatures by mixing and matching the different parts. The flexibility of the design encourages creativity and offers opportunities for children to invent new, unique creatures.
Upon capturing the image, the system uses machine learning algorithms to identify the shape of the newly created creature. This recognition process enables the system to map the identified creature to a corresponding life environment prompt that is pre-configured in the system's database.
Environment Generation
After recognizing the creature, the system retrieves the appropriate environment prompt and utilizes the GPT-4 API to generate a detailed description of the creature's habitat. Several key factors influence the generated environment, including the creature's mythical origins, the visual attributes of its habitat, and the season in which the scene will be set. The system applies a seasonal tone to the environment, with four predefined seasonal styles: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Each seasonal tone affects the colors, lighting, and ambiance of the generated environment, allowing for the creation of varied and dynamic settings for the creatures.
MIT Media Lab 2025