QuiltBuilt
Project Statement during a Product Design course:
Identify, design, and build an entertainment product that positively affects family organization, well-being, and creativity.
Our team conducted empathy fieldwork with families, unpacked their needs, and brainstormed product ideas. One idea we arrived at to satisfy positive creative freedom for kids, and easy clean-up for parents, was a blanket that could be frozen into 3D shapes and structures. We found that kids love making blanket forts. Parents don’t like the mess and misuse (potential damage) of furniture that comes with blanket forts. The QuiltBuilt would allow for fun and safe blanket structures, but also folds down flat, taking up minimal space when stored behind or under furniture.
We built some prototypes to test with kids at a children’s science museum, and evaluated their response. Children were interested and liked the idea of QuiltBuilt, but I think the size of this demo version limited the effect we hoped to achieve. If there were more time to continue on this project, I would like to build a larger version to see if kids would interact with it for longer and might arrive at more exciting structures.
