Now that we’ve finally reached the end of Let's Go Design Project 2 and the multisport practice cage, the team thought it would fun to take a quick look back and highlight some things that didn’t make the final cut of the episodes.
One of the biggest challenges of the whole project was the inclusion of three sports, rather than just two. The team wanted to surprise the fans and keep the creativity of the design flowing. However, it turned out to be the trickiest element to the project! The reason? We ended up having a very tough time accounting for the different shapes of the balls with the mechanisms to catch or return the balls. Transitioning from an oval to a sphere had us all scratching our heads. As you’ve seen in the episodes, we ended up designing two sides to the cage – and used SolidWorks Motion to simulate how the ball would respond to the “catch” mechanism (also known as the hopper).
Beyond these sorts of issues, the team constantly had to ask: what mechanisms are we incorporating that are perfectly designed, and which machines need a refreshed design? In the case of the multisport practice cage, the launchers were a technology that was tested and proved to work well as it was. It was an element of the cage we didn’t need to redesign – and with time limitations, we were happy to take the opportunity to consider other areas of the cage where we could hone in our creativity.
One critical piece of this project--and the team’s overwhelming creative drive--was the feedback we received from our fans. We saw a huge amount of fan participation during the first project, but were really impressed by the level of engagement with the practice cage. For the team, we found the fan comments essential to pushing the bar of innovation within the design. We realize that we did not develop a physical prototype, but we’d love to see a member of the community eventually improve or build the design!
The team would also like to give a special shout out to Stratasys, Wacom and JUGS Sports for their contributions to the project!
What did you think of Project 2? Where could we improve our design process in anticipation for Project 3? Have you figured out what Project 3 is yet? Send us your comments via Twitter or Facebook or in the section below!
Recent Comments