For the past ten years students from the University of Minnesota’s Toy Product Design class participate in the annual Playsentation. Each team of students pitches, conceptualizes, prototypes and produces a toy using the university’s state of the art fabrication lab.
A Playsentation is a combination of a theatrical presentation of the concepts and designs of the students’ class projects and a live demonstration of how the toys work in front of toy designers, UofM faculty and students, engineers and of course actual children. For this years Playsentation the theme was “Making Makers”, so of course 3D printing played a large part in many of the projects.
The students enrolled in the Toy Product Design class have full access to the UofM Design Labs at the W.L. Hall Workshop and its staff will even instruct them on the use of the equipment. The workshop has any manufacturing and prototyping machines that you would ever need to design and create a new toy, including CNC routers and plasma cutters, laser cutters, a vacuum former, lathes and several Stratasys industrial 3D printers. It’s essentially maker-Nirvana.
Here’s a video spotlighting the UofM’s W.L. Hall Workshop:
Some of the standout toys heavily feature 3D printed parts, like the Chozmo, a toy gun that you load with chocolate chips and it will extrude the chocolate in lines similar to a glue gun, or the 3Doodler 3D printer pen. The student teams used a 3D printer to make the prototyped parts look like a traditionally manufactured toy. It’s pretty amazing to see how the original prototype mock-ups can differ dramatically from the final product.
Another stand out is ROGR, a small alien robot that you can program to follow your simple instructions. He reads direction tokens that you show him, and then will replicate those directions in the order that they were shown to him. His flying saucer spaceship was 3D printed specifically to hold the direction tokens in place perfectly.
You can see all of the awesome toy concepts – several of which I would very much like to play with – on the UMN Toy Lab website as well as all the toy concepts from the previous ten Playsentations. Except the first year, they forgot to take pictures. No really.
The Toy Product Design class has a long history of launching careers in manufacturing, product fabrication and design with alumi that work for Stratasys, Target Corporation and even designing Hello Kitty toys, so it’s very likely that many of this year’s students will be the toy designers of tomorrow. And chances are they’re going to be using 3D printers to do it.
