FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Interactive Game Inspiring Curiosity and Exploration

Nalisha Chouraria's The Curious Gastronaut is an interactive game designed to inspire children and families to explore the exciting world of food through play. The game encourages players to use their imagination to gather ingredients, creatively combine them, and explore weird and wonderful bite-size edible experiments using all five senses.

Uniquely, the game makes no mention of specific food items, encouraging players to reimagine food and experiment from the ground up rather than from existing recipes. It is designed to reinvent how families eat and encourages playful exploration beyond the game.

The game is manifested into a physical card game perfect for collaborative play, with potential for digitization. It is portable, gender-neutral, and perfectly sized for little hands. The prompts are whimsical and humorous, stimulating the imagination and triggering joy and curiosity.

Players can choose to play with real food or imaginatively, with or without cooking, and can select from solo, collaborative, or competitive modes to discover the exciting edible world on their own terms.

The project started in January 2015 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and finished in January 2020 in Gold Coast, Australia. It was exhibited at HDK Academy for Design & Art in 2015 and was awarded the best thesis project.

Using exploratory research, Nalisha Chouraria aimed to foster healthy food relationships in children through play. The game's design overcame challenges by introducing features like unlocking and journey maps, and by simplifying the gameplay into short, simple sessions.

Nalisha Chouraria is a multidisciplinary designer and illustrator who specializes in play and design for children. Her work includes illustration, play design, graphic design, event design, and digital and physical toys and games. She brings the child's perspective into her designs through research, playtests, observation, interviews, and workshops.

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