Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Theodore Richards Final Product

I am a junior at Parsons School of Design, and this semester I decided to take a toy design class because, unlike most of my current classes, it was about making a physical product that could potentially be manufactured and sold at mass scale. This idea of actually building out a project to a point where it is basically finished, as opposed to a proof of concept or speculative piece seemed interesting. In our first class, as a warmup exercise, we were asked to design a toy in five minutes in our sketchbook. I came up with this:

First sketch

It was a cardboard block system, held together by rubber bands. While I didn’t think the idea was perfect, I was excited by the thought of taking on a project as widespread as blocks and putting my own spin on it. I had a set of blocks growing up that my dad had made out of scrap wood in his woodshop, and I loved playing with Lego, as well. So for the next two weeks or so, I scrounged up as much cardboard that I could from trash piles in my building and took them to the laser cutter at school until I got a design down that made sense to me. Here is an early cut:

First cut

So after I got the design of the pieces down, the next part was to tell a story. What changes could I make to the design to help the user better tell a story? The first thing I thought of was size, which worked for length and height but not width:

Early Prototypes

This helped a little but was still very vague in storytelling because there’s only so much you can do with that drab cardboard brown. Also, holding the pieces together with rubber bands was a hassle, so I decided I needed to come up with a peg system:

Early Prototype

The color was still really affecting the storytelling, though, so I went back to the trash room, where I found white, green, and dark blue cardboard. Perfect, now, with the brown thrown in there too, I had all the colors I needed to create a mockup of the world. So I went back to the laser lab, bought tons of rubber bands, and put together what I though was a pretty good representation of earth in cardboard block form:

Cardboard Color “World” Prototype

I even wrote up four short essays and put them into a “Theory Guide” to explain all of the thinking that went into it and where people could take it:

Theory Guide Excerpts

No one got it. People in class had no idea what it was supposed to be. It was pretty disappointing at first, but it showed me where my flaws lay. First, I couldn’t expect people to read paragraphs of text in order to understand how to play with blocks, which really didn’t say anything concrete anyway. Second, there was no indication of scale, whatsoever, especially because the pieces, themselves, were caricatural and very oversized, compared to the board, which was supposed to represent the earth. Lastly, the medium, itself, was too hard to overlook. While the color helped, the cardboard still held too many connotations.

So I redesigned everything in wood on my computer in Sketch and started thinking about what needed to change. The first thing was the distracting slits where the rubber bands needed to hide in the cardboard could now be taken away. Also, the pieces could be any color because the paint looked a lot better on wood than the cardboard, and I didn’t have the facilities to dye the cardboard. And third, the pieces didn’t have to be so big anymore because the folding process no longer had to happen:

Digital Sketches of Possibilities with Wood

So once I got the design down for the wooden blocks, I wanted to make them. One problem: the laser cutters at ours school can only go through wood 3/16″ or smaller, and I didn’t trust myself to drill or cut the pieces myself so that they would be as accurate as I wanted. (In the end, I was playing with 1/100″ changes.) So, I decided in order to make an accurate proof of concept, I should just cut a bunch of pieces out of 1/8″ thick wood and glue them together until I got the size I wanted. I cut out dozens of pieces with different lengths and square-shaped holes, so they wouldn’t spin around as much. The thing was was that I liked them how they were, gluing them together really made no point because you could just stack as many as you wanted, especially because we were only working with a matter of inches:

Wooden Prototypes

After playing with it for a while, I got my aha moment. Every structure I made looked like some sort of architecture, so I started to think about how I could push people in that direction. Immediately, color came back into my mind, but material seemed important too. So, using some model railroad grass and joint compound, I made “grass” and “concrete” pieces, as well as the wood pieces, then I gave them to people to play with:

Grass/Concrete Prototypes

This iteration came across a lot better than the first. The scale was smaller, so the user could do more. The pieces were more specific, so the user could envision ideas easier, and the name, “Pegland Architecture,” replaced the entire “Theory Guide” and was more effective in leading them down the path I wanted. The problem with this design was that it was messy and inconsistent. I had no way of making every piece the same or even promising that two of the “concrete” pieces could even sit beside each other on the board without getting in the way of each other. So the material choices, while good proofs of concept, had to change to something that could be as precise as the laser cut wood.

The other problem I had was that there was still no real indicator of scale because the pieces, themselves, really didn’t speak about size. So I decided that there needed to be something beyond the pieces that gave their scale. I wanted their environment to inform their scale. After playing around a little, I came up with the idea of coasts and eventually realized that I could stack them on top of the existing base. This would add a new dimension to the environment, as well as help tell a story about geography:

Digtal Sketch of How Pieces Would Interact with Coast

Once I had the base and the coasts, it was time to choose what materials I wanted to use. I started looking online at different coasts around the world and found that I particularly liked how the Greek coast looked and how the beautiful white stone and glass buildings sat on the sides of the hills. So, I decided that I was going to base the set off of Mykonos. I decided to make the pieces resemble white stone (painted wood), glass (clear acrylic), and grass (felt) for rooftop gardens. Once I had all of this, the story I was trying to tell was finally close to being told. The only problem was that the wooden pegs that I was using to hold everything together were way too distracting, so I replaced them with clear pegs and used the wooden ones to create some trees, and the product was complete:

Final Product Images

The last step in the process of turning these blocks into a full-fledged product was packaging. I already had the font and sketches, so the outside of the packaging was pretty easy to design. But I wanted the packaging to somehow demonstrate how the toy itself worked, and I wanted the pieces to stay in place when the box was closed. So after a few iterations, I decided on this shape:

Final Packaging Images

Now, this isn’t exactly a product. It isn’t for sale (yet). But I feel like the process of getting from wrapping rubber bands around cardboard to a near finished product has really helped inform me about the design process and how iterations and thinking through every detail can really turn an idea into something that I’m proud of. And I think I’ll continue to work on this into the future, and hopefully you’ll see Pegland Architecture toys on the shelf in the near future.

To see more images of the project, please visit: https://theodorerichards.work/pegland

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Growing an Idea from an Interest to a Product was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Growing an Idea from an Interest to a Product

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