My project is a version of Hanayama puzzle which is a kind of disassembly puzzles for people to solve. This toy is designed for one of my friends, Nate, who is going through a lot of pressure and workload, to act like a distraction from all his works and relieve some of his stress. I’ll try mail the thing to
him and tell him to record a video for me.
As my post for week 2 mentioned, playing for me is mostly and most importantly for fun. In that post, I also explained how all the readings and videos we did inspired me to form this idea, which masically is: “why is everyone treating play so seriously?”. So, based on the idea of play is play, I interviewed Nate about his work and study life recently and asked him what does he want most under such pressure, he said anything as a distraction would be great. Then he said he really enjoys playing quiz games and solving puzzles which he finds very relieving, so I thought making him this puzzle toy could help him in some way.
Reflection on the toy itself:
First in the designing process, there wasn’t too much trouble because I’m replicating the toy from a video to my sketch paper. But looking at the toy actually working and functioning I was able to replicate it exactly the same onto my sketch. So I would say this was a great way to use my skills.
In terms of how the toy works as a whole I’ll have to update this when the toy actually got delivered to me.
But over all I feel like my toy was a bit simple and straightforward and there are definitely things that I could improve if I had more time such as making some more decorations on top and also I could paint on the printed model to make it look nicer. But afterall it doesn’t affect the whole functionality and the idea of the toy too much so I think this would be it fot this toy’s potential. But I must say that there were certainly more new ideas about other toys that I had which due to the time was not realized. I could have gotten on a whole different route on this. But I guess I’ll just stop here.
Documentation of the process:
the youtube video that I replicated the model from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FKOeYEpDXE
then the sketch I did:
The rendered model: 
the video of my friend playing the toy itself, I love how he was not able to take out the last piece lolll
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