HEXAMORPH
Construction Toy for Ages 5-7
4th Year BID - 4 Weeks - Team Project
A fun project that truly brought me back in touch with my inner child.
As an introduction to the world of toy design, this was one of the most enjoyable products I’ve worked on, along with my colleague Ryan Parr. If we are honest, industrial designers are secretly just children at heart who love playing with Legos!
While it was fun, we had to challenge ourselves to create a unique toy in a heavily saturated market and carefully consider age capabilities and traditional gender preferences.
TARGET MARKET
To get comfortable designing for young users, we began with a thorough exploration of our chosen age and gender: considering their physical and cognitive abilities, social behaviour, pop culture, and traditional likes/dislikes.
INSPIRATION & COMPETITORS
Upon realizing that the market for construction toys is heavily saturated, especially for our chosen target user, it was clear that we needed a fresh idea. And so, we built off our users’ active curiosity and impressionable minds and explored the elements of illusion and surprise to achieve a fun “magic” moment.
Inspired in particular by the work of Jonty Hurwitz, we saw a unique gap in the market and decided to pursue a toy concept that fuses the fun aspects of both construction and activity toys.
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
After exploring various methods of creating visual illusions, we settled on the Conical Mirror method. We thought it would be fun for children to insert pegs into a board, following a stencil, to construct something…only they wouldn’t know what they were making until the end!
Based on our research, average Lego sets for ages 5-7 provide between 300-1500pc. So we iterated several combinations of pegboards and hex pegs (varying in size) to gauge the optimal image fidelity and required pieces.