For this assignment we were told to design a fidget toy to be 3D printed, we would empathise the design for a person with autism.

Design

An inspiration I had for my design was the classic fidget cube toy that was popular a few years back.

My reasoning for the fidget toy’s design has several key points. An idea I kept in mind whilst designing was to achieve a symmetrical design, as people with autism have an increased sense of perception and can perceive symmetry better than those who are not autistic. The fidget toy has simple geometric shapes in its design. A study states that autistic people reacted more positively when shown images of various simple shapes compared to the non-autistic people.

Created in Tinkercad, I started with the dice object and used various objects which I scaled differently to fit the dice’s face. I placed six different shapes on each of the dices faces, five of which I gouged out of the die, and the other was fraction of a sphere coming out of the die.

It purposely has no sharp points as I didn’t want it to be used as a weapon if the autistic person was angry and were to throw it or hurt themselves with it.

Size

The fidget toy measures (50mm x 50mm x 50mm), originally it was smaller but I upscaled it. I wanted to keep it small but big enough that the person can feel the each side of the square comfortably and so it was also not heavy if it were thrown.

Images

Images of my design, screenshots were taken from Windows Print 3D application.

References

Belin, L., Henry, L., Destays, M., Hausberger, M., & Grandgeorge, M. (2017). Simple Shapes Elicit Different Emotional Responses in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Neurotypical Children and Adults. Frontiers In Psychology, 8. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00091

Perreault, A., Gurnsey, R., Dawson, M., Mottron, L., & Bertone, A. (2011). Increased Sensitivity to Mirror Symmetry in Autism. Plos ONE, 6(4), e19519. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019519