Doh Racer

Aspirational Dough Play

Design blogs are full of toys that look beautiful, but many have limited play value, often living their life out untouched on shelves. We wanted to design a contemporary-looking dough-based playset with a tangible play experience to see if we could blend the product aspirations of children and adults. The objective was that the parents would be engaged with the look and feel of the product as well as the child who can engage with the playset on several levels. The great thing about dough play is that the child can openly expand their 3D world, only limited by the amount of dough they have to hand. The conscious design to create a racetrack was driven by the rise in popularity of Formula 1 and the principle that the track enables collaborative play options with parents and siblings playing together to make and then roleplay with the set.

Before embarking on playing some children will often ask, “What can I make?” Looking for outside inspiration to kick-start their world of play. The dough truck offers numerous play platforms, but the foundation of the playset is that the tuck contains all you need to create a unique racetrack play experience. We liked the idea of everything fitting back within the truck so it can be efficiently stored, potentially on display rather than hidden away in a cupboard. Interacting with dough is a very tactile multi-sensory play experience and we wanted to offer all the dough play interfaces within the set, extruding, moulding, rolling and embossing. We wanted the product itself to use a range of tactile materials that built on the core dough play experience.

We progressed the design through the usual toy design process. Beyond the insights we explored various concept directions in sketch format, arriving at the dough truck solutions. We tested the concept with a number of low-fidelity prototypes to fix the scale and form of the trucks.

The track itself can be extruded using the truck’s onboard extruder and various dies to form the track profile. Once extruded the track can be formed into any shape using the dough’s natural material properties. The race cars are created using open back moulds (stored in the cab) to create the body, which is placed on a chassis with moving wheels, this allows the child to choose their car colour. The track can be rolled and embossed with various patterns made from the pop-off wheels which are then clipped into the threaded removable extruder handle. The materials utilised in the toy design are a mixture of Green PE and beach wood, beach being one of the more sustainable hardwoods as it is easily replenishable, not endangered and easy to clean. From one truck a larger play set can be created and engaged with in a number of ways and then once finished can all be packed up back into the truck and safely stored away until the next play session.

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