Toy Design
When unhealthy eating habits are combined with deficient physical activity, serious health problems resulting in obesity come along. It is true that the internet technology has a great positive effect on our lives however, when it comes to children, especially those in preschool age, it is essential to make them play games that will improve their communication skills and gain the habit of an active life.
The mission of PınarInstitute is to support scientific projects, take place in social networks and carry out educational activities in order to raise awareness in the public on food, health and nutrition topics and quality life. The missions of the institute furthermore include making researches to contribute to the healthy development of the society, supporting researches and trainings, announce the results and to perform activities to this end within the scope of social responsibility.
Since the Institute attaches great importance to raise awareness for healthy nutrition and physical activities of children, it places special emphasis on children as its target audience. For this reason, the Institution developed a training program titled “Let's Move With Fun, Let’s Eat Healthy” and conducted its first practices in 2013. It already acts in collaboration with different institutions to improve the content and scope of the training program.
The "Design of Play and Educational Materials for Healthy and Balanced Nutrition" project involved the process of designing informative and educational toys for preschool children to get to know the food groups as well as on the food groups to provide them with most healthy and balanced nutrition. Industrial Design Department 2nd Year students started with these design requests and definitions sent to them at the beginning of the 2014 - 2015 Spring semester and developed their designs in a period of 14 weeks during their courses and in line with the interim jury criticisms together with their trials at the kindergartens visited for field studies.
Among the fifteen designs developed in total, the first 4 toys, which were evaluated as the most successful upon the voting of the jury, were selected and the awards of the project owners were presented with the organization of a ceremony held with the participation of Yaşar Group Senior Executives on date June 17, 2015.
The eligible Pınar Institute licensed toy / game / training materials designed by Yaşar University, Faculty of Art and Design, Industrial Design Department and Design Studio will be considered as auxiliary elements that support the “Let’s Move With Fun, Let’s Eat Healthy” Project. These will also be used as supporting training materials in the Institute's future training on balanced and healthy nutrition.
At the point where the project has reached, these four projects, developed as student projects with the collaboration of Yaşar University Industrial Design Department and were deemed worthy of an award, will be designed as “Training Material by Play” final products to be developed together and in line with this training program by means of going through a professional design process and being used in the mentioned trainings of Pınar Institute. In this context, with the decision resolved by Yaşar University Project Evaluation Commission and upon the approval of Yaşar University Research-Development and Application Center, the project gave a start to its studies in February 2016 as a Scientific Research Project (SRP). In the final stage of the project, it is aimed to obtain the license of the design within the scope of intellectual, proprietary and industrial rights and for a utility model work to be conducted.