Playground Equipment
Toy Product Design playground equipment project
A playground company based outside Minneapolis, called Landscape Structures, was the sponsor for my Toy Product Design course; we were placed in teams of six and tasked to design, prototype, and finalize a playground 'event'. My team and I came up with this stand-on maze that consists of a giant spring supporting a large, circular maze with a marble inside.
The assignment was to build the playground event as it would be in its actual setting, so it is made of high-density polyethylene, acrylic, and steel hardware. We used a CNC router to create the HDPE parts then screwed them together from the bottom, while the figures inside were 3D printed and an acrylic sheet was placed on top.
The process to get to this final product included market research, scouting out playgrounds in the city, interviews with kids, many sketch models and rapid prototypes, peer reviews, idea pitching, and idea iteration. In the end we created a product that is not only elegant and beautiful, but intuitive and fun.
