Industrial - Bachelor

Crotate – Creative play at home

Crotate bridges the gap between inspiring children’s creativity and making life easier for parents. Mesh bags keep contents visible and accessible, while the bright orange wheel makes rotating and packing away simple. Resembling a portal, Crotate invites children into imaginative play, helping families spend less time tidying and more time creating together.

Madyn Venter

Vote Now

WHY?

the problem

Open-ended child-initiated creative play has many benefits for all ages, but in recent years, there has been a noticeable decline in opportunities for children aged 5-8 to engage in free creative play at home. School and Osh have outlets for fully open-ended creative play on occasion, but kids only spent around 20% of a year at school and not all kids go to Osh. This makes it even more important for kids to have those opportunities at home too. However, there are many external factors that make it incompatible with the home setting.

Research

This research report dives into what external factors have the biggest impact. It includes various research methods including benchmarking, 18 parent survey responses and interviews with three experts and one parent. This all led to one prominent design problem; loose parts play in particular is messy and time consuming to set up, pack away and store. Making it harder for parents to allow frequent access to supplies. While children need that visual and physical access to build inspiration for when they do get the chance to create freely.

Name
Child-Initiated Open-Ended Creative Play Research Report
File Type
application
File Size
1 B
Download File

Crotate

Crotate is a wall mounted hidden pully system bag rack where children can rotate up to 10 bags of pompoms, pipecleaners, natural collections, and any loose parts supplies they can get their hands on, to create masterpieces whenever they have free time and when inspiration strikes. Crotate bridges the gap between what children need to spark their imagination and what parents need for creative play to be easier at home. Its mesh bags keep all contents visible and accessible, while the bright orange wheel makes rotating supplies simple and fun. Packing away becomes less overwhelming for both children and parents, turning cleanup into part of the routine rather than a chore.

Details

Form

Crotate features repeated round shapes at a consistent vertical orientation with soft edges making it seamlessly fit in its home environment while still exhibiting a playful feel. The bags are made to match this with small bags being orange and large bags purple to even out colour presence. They are an organic rounded form with the cord locks and loops also repeating these patterns. The mesh part is intentionally off centre so kids can see its contents front on while hung up.

CMF

Bright orange and purple were chosen as colour psychology research suggests they encourage imagination and creativity as well as creating a playful contrast to the sleek wooden base. ABS was chosen for its strength and durability, well needed for long term use by kids, the hooks and wheel are glossy to attract attention while the bag loops and handle are textured to encourage tactile interaction. The bags are made of ripstop nylon for strength, water proofing and easy cleanability.

Ergonomics + Anthropometrics

The height is 1.6m to fit on a standard wall at a comfortable reach height for 8yr old children when placed at the top of the wall, when securing it to the wall, parents can place the wheel at shoulder height of their shortest child. The ball handle is 45mm in diameter for comfortable use of all users especially kids with small hands.

Safety + Maintenance

The mesh bottoms on bags allow children to see and become inspired by the supplies, while ensuring the bags are breathable preventing any suffocation hazards, the bags have a wide drawstring opening to continue visibility into play time. Although designed for 5years+, the drawstrings comply with 22cm cord length regulation to ensure safety of siblings under the age of 3. For maintenance, parents can remove the inner frame as it is secured through pressure fit, the ball hooks are intentionally designed in a way that holds the frames in its own channel to ensure kids can’t remove it accidentally.

Layer by layer

Process

Ideating

Prototyping

Final Model

Madyn Venter

Madyn is passionate about designing to make everyday life easier through thoughtful user-centred design. She focuses on bridging the needs of diverse users, especially children, to enhance their engagement of the world around them by creating useful, meaningful and exciting experiences.

Vote For This Project

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
This field is hidden when viewing the form
Project