01
Choose who and where
The child picks a character and a place. Different combinations open a different story — so the first decision already changes everything.
The idea
Deciding is a skill, and like any skill it improves with practice. In everyday life there often isn't a right and a wrong answer: what you choose depends on how you feel, on what you think matters, on being able to see the whole picture and put things in order.
So the question we started from was simple to ask and hard to answer: how can children practise deciding?
Our answer was a story with dilemmas in it. The child reads, reaches a fork, and has to choose among several options — which decision do I take to get on with the story? What makes the choice real is what happens next: the child draws the scene they chose on a transparent card, slides it into the device, and the projector puts it on the wall. The story they decided becomes visible.
Silu in use
How it works
02
Read
The story runs on the tablet, read alone or with an adult.
03
Solve the dilemma
At a certain point the story stops and asks how to continue. Several options, none of them marked as the right one.
04
Draw the decision
The child lays a transparent card over the tablet, traces the scene and the characters they chose, and makes it theirs.
05
Project and play
The card goes into Silu, the projector turns on, and the scene lands on the wall.
The gesture that carries the concept
This is the part I'd defend today: the transparent card over the tablet screen. It solves two problems at once. It lets a six-year-old draw something recognisable without being able to draw — the screen shows the outline underneath. And it takes the decision out of the screen and into the child's hands: you don't tap an option, you make the thing you chose.
The app
Structure and craft
The body is laser-cut plywood, painted, with a drawer for the markers and cards, a handle so a child can carry it, and two controls on the side: a switch and a knob. The hardware is deliberately simple — the interesting part isn't the projector, it's what the projector makes possible.
What testing changed
The first version was a different object: a box with an LCD screen inside that showed the story and offered two ways to continue. Testing it taught us two things, and both of them killed that version.
Two options are not a decision. With only two choices, children weren't deciding — they were guessing which one was the right one. More options make the choice feel like a choice.
The LCD wasn't good enough as an experience. From there we moved the story onto an app, first on a phone, then onto a tablet — because on a bigger screen the transparent card idea works, and the child can trace what they see underneath.
What came next, and what didn't
Where we would have taken it: connecting the device to the app through the cloud, so the projector knows which step of the story the child has reached and can add sound; a rounder, more childlike icon set, closer to the age range; and — the honest one — more testing with children, which is the only way to find out what's missing.
Looking back at it years later, what stays with me isn't the object. It's that the strongest design decision came from a failed test: dropping the two-option version was the moment the project became about deciding rather than about guessing.
