Puzzle Cube

These four images display the product throughout its multiple stages in the design process, but this only captures the final stages of the product's entire conception.

1. The first step in the engineering design process is defining the problem. I started off with a design brief that contains the problem statement, design statement, and information about the client.

1. • Client: Fine Office Furniture, Inc.

   • Target Consumer: High school-aged people

   • Problem statement: A local office furniture manufacturing company throws away tens of thousands of scrap ¾” hardwood cubes that result from its furniture construction processes. The material is expensive, and the scrap represents a sizeable loss of profit.

   • Design Statement: Fine Office Furniture, Inc. would like to return value to its waste product by using it as the raw material for desktop novelty items that will be sold on the showroom floor. Design, build, test, document, and present a three-dimensional puzzle system that is made from scrap hardwood cubes. The puzzle system must provide an appropriate degree of challenge to high school students.

In defining the problem, I also had to think about the constraints that came along with the creation of the final product. These were the requirements that I had to meet and some of the limitations that I had to work around in creating the final product.

1. The puzzle must be fabricated from 27 – ¾″ hardwood cubes.

2. The puzzle system must contain exactly five puzzle parts.

3. Each individual puzzle part must consist of at least four, but no more than six hardwood cubes that are permanently attached to each other.

4. All Puzzle parts should extrude in all 3 directions by more than 1 block. (No Flat Pieces.)

5. No two puzzle parts can be the same.

6. The five puzzle parts must assemble to form a 2 ¼″ cube.

7. Some puzzle parts should interlock.

8. The puzzle should require high school students an average of 8 minutes to solve.

This was definitely the hardest step, but undeniably the most important.

2. The next step in the design process is concept generation. At this point, I knew I was developing a puzzle cube that fits within the given constraints. I knew that each piece had to be made up of 4-6 individual cubes, so I began to sketch every possible iteration of 4,5, or 6 cube configuration. From these sketches, I chose 5 pieces that, met all the requirements, fit together to make a cube, and would make for an interesting device.

3. The next step in the design process is to develop a solution. After choosing my 5 pieces I used different colors to represent each piece. The very first picture in the top left corner shows how I filled in the entire cube using the individual colors, to make sure that it would all come together. I then sketched each piece in isometric and orthographic views. I finally had a peer review my design to make sure it was ready for assembly!

4. The next step in the design process is constructing and testing a prototype. I used snap cubes, which are similar to Legos, to make each individual piece. I made sure to keep the colors assigned to each piece, consistent with the colors used in the snap cubes. As shown in the second picture, I put them all together to see how the final product would look. This was the first time I saw my initial concept sketch come to fruition!

The other portion of this step is testing the prototype. I separated the cube into it's 5 original pieces and gave it to some of my classmates to try and figure out. Surely enough my classmates were captivated by the product and it took them about 7 minutes to solve. The prototype passed the test!