Empathize

Collaborate

Research

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Physical Fabrication

Mag Maze is an exhibit designed to teach children aged 0 - 4 about how magnets influence one another, through accessible and open-ended play. Mag Maze was designed in partnership with the Discovery Museum, as part of their initiative to redesign several existing exhibits. Mag Maze provides a valuable introductory experience to the Discovery Museum’s lineup of magnet-based exhibits. Mag Maze is a large circular maze held between a piece of clear acrylic plastic on either side. Within the maze, there are various magnetic tiles with south and north poles. These poles are color-coded red for south, and north for blue. Additionally, attached to the outer rim of the maze there are cylindrical-shaped control pucks that have magnets embedded into their tips. These control pucks also share the same color coding pattern as the magnetic tiles. The user can manipulate a magnetic tile by repelling or attaching it via a control puck. Depending on the polarity of the control puck, holding it above or below a tile will influence its movement differently. The user can then play however they wish within the maze. The maze acts as a familiar environment for many preschool-aged children where they can comfortably engage in an unfamiliar medium. When the user leaves the exhibit they leave primed with enough understanding to participate and learn from the surrounding magnet-based exhibits.



Entering this studio I was very excited to once again be working with a very young target audience. I worked with clients focused on early education before and it was an extremely enjoyable and productive experience. However, In my previous experience, there was limited play testing of our designs. Thus our learning was mostly constrained to the NuVu space. So when I learned we would be doing regular visits to our site and observing our target audience I was determined to make the most of it. I feel that I accomplished this goal. This is largely due to the commitment I had to both research and routinely building empathy for our client. Much of our time was spent in the research phase for this project. This involved using resources like the APE observations of the Exploratorium (https://shorturl.at/ao568), as well as gathering precedents to inform our design decisions (https://shorturl.at/HLNP2). In addition to building empathy, I also feel I was successful in translating that research into a physical prototype. Mag Maze had many productive playtests throughout the studio that each pushed our design forward (https://shorturl.at/pCOT3). My group had effective communication and collaboration that made so adjustments and iterations could be made asynchronously. This allowed us to react to feedback and get a new playtest ready expeditiously. In tandem, our collaboration and dedication to research made for an incredibly successful and enjoyable project.