Make it cute

Sustainable Corrugate Playhouse

Designed while working at Spanner Product Development.

Through a series of creative workshops, sketches, and scaled to full size mockups, we worked together to make Make It Cute’s dreams come true. Aligning with their vision for a sustainable, simple, and safe playhouse. We helped brainstorm and test solutions for an easy setup and teardown, to be used multiple times, and without tabs. With high touchpoints areas such as windows and the door, cardboard is folded over for soft, non-sharp edges ensuring user safety. 2 ply corrugate cardboard enforces durability with an inserted floor securing structural integrity.

Contributions:

industrial design + product design | creative unlocking, structure architecture and integrity, prototype building, user experience, ergonomics, user journey, user safety, design details, materials, DFM, packaging considerations, vendor communication

*note: final graphics were done by illustrator, Sophia Vincent Guy

Collaborators:

Make it Cute | Anne Hoehn, Maureen North, and Amanda Seyfried

Spanner Product Development | Arne Lang-Ree and Marco Berkhout

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Photo Credit: Make It Cute

My nieces and nephews enjoying their houses!

Process

3 Phases

At Spanner we guided the Make It Cute Team through 3 scopes of work:

Workshop | Re-ignite inspiration for their vision. Create storyboards and sketches to unfold a story of design opportunities and play patterns a corrugate playhouse can unlock. Provide initial business strategy and early product design supp
Design Sprint | Deeper exploration of the playhouse architecture and folding methods through a series of sketches, mockups, and initial user testing. Prepare initial dielines for a first round prototype. Connect and help facilitate communication between the Make it Cute team with contract manufacturers.
Design Support | Review first prototype and refine details to enhance, test, and verify user experience, safety, and aesthetics.

1. Workshop

Storyboards | Highlight pain points and opportunities for the user experience and product details. This details the user experience from ordering the product to every day use and storage. Simplicity is necessary for setup/teardown, durability is vital for play safety, and size and folding methods are key to storage. EDITTTT