Acorn

•

Acorn

Product + Packaging

This project was done as a form of formal realization of the processes revolving around product development and post development.

Acorn is a hand crafted spinning top, aimed at expressing a modernistic appearance with a traditional cause.

The spinning portion of Acorn, which is rotationally symmetrical is mainly made up of teak wood, was turned on the lathe machine and was later painted. The aim was to make a suitable aerodynamic form for a longer duration of spin, and also should express an modernistic appearance. The handle is made of pine. The entire making process was basically hands on experience and some iterative sketches and improvements.

First impressions are that minuscule opportunities that a designer shouldn’t miss, and Packaging plays a major part in grabbing that, for a product. We, for a start, visited the toy stores nearby, and delved into the experience of a customer, but with analytical mind of dissecting every first impressions that we made about the toys on the shelves, and forming insights over them. This experience made us more aware about the kind of packaging that our toys of various genres individually would require for their specific reach, based on age limits, and target audience. This then extended to the type of materials that would suit the aura of the context and thereby creating a package that would make the process of un-boxing, part of the whole product experience, rather than just a basic protection barrier during transportation.

The initial ideas involved brands that revived ‘street games”, and other forgotten traditional games. Later, the experience of playing with fallen acorns in our childhood, struck a chord with everyone of us.
This was the beginning of our toy, Acorn presented by the fictitious Handicraft toy revival company, GROVE.

Key-line drawings of the final Packaging, the internal compartment is designed such that no gluing is required and can be die-cut entirely, the toy remains fixed at its position and gives a uniform experience to all customers and can be used

throughout the lifetime of the toy itself.

For the initial packaging ideas we decided to go ahead with triangular box and made a scale down prototype. After a few insights on errors in the tolerance which didn't let the box close properly, we tried prototyping with the actual material we planned to use i.e. Millboard. For the final ideal we decided to go with a cuboid box, which occupies much less volume than all our previous ideas and was much easier to produce and assemble and also easier to stack in stores. After that calculating all the tolerance including the graphics we made the final packaging.