CASE STUDY – BRCK + Kio
Digital literacy meets remote classrooms.
Creating the brand and experience for a digital classroom in a box concept, built for emerging markets.
BRCK is a technology connectivity company based in Nairobi. In 2015, they approached us with a bold new idea – a digital classroom in a box concept, designed for emerging markets.
The model is made up of tablets and a BRCK unit encased in a box. The BRCK unit connects vicinity schools within range of a mobile phone tower to the internet. It also provides locally hosted content to the tablets within each box.
Brand Creation
We created a brand for this digital classroom in a box, naming it KIO. The name was inspired by, kioo, the Swahili word for glass and also, window.
We simplified it to fit with the desired brand character: simple, easily recognised & pronounced, and with potential to support the initiative’s growth.
The logo was designed to represent children’s learning and play, abstracted to an extremely simplified and iconic pictorial brand mark.
Furthermore, it could be coupled in various colour combinations to personalise different tablets.
The world around us is consistently changing, and the ability to pass knowledge from generation to generation has been central to this change.
Cavemen painted on walls, the Pharaohs chiselled on granite monuments, then came the scholars with inked feathers and scrolls. Today, we write with pen and paper, while our children intuitively embrace touch-screens and programmable devices.
We kept this in mind while designing the brand’s visual elements.
The Kio tablets offer a lighter technology footprint with an intuitive interface designed for children. The tablet can run multimedia content, has enough battery power to manage the intermittent power in rural areas and is ruggedised to reduce breakage.
