Project team: Diego Rivas, Leah Rosenbaum, Asher Saghian, Kingston Xu, Natalie Zhang
Course: Critical Making, spring 2017
KitKast takes an imaginative approach to removing the stigma and limitations that come with wearing a cast. Having seen how children customize existing casts by drawing or painting on their surfaces, the team wondered how they might take this further, enabling novel forms of customization. What emerged from their design process was a playful prototype for a cast as modular platform, with a custom bubble blower as a sample module.
The team used 3D printing and laser-cutting to build the cast’s shell and module inserts, and learned from existing toys to design a reimagined enclosure and actuation mechanism that involved a switch soldered to a servo. They tested their electronics while wearing the cast, iterating on their inventive bubble-blowing mechanism as they simulated its uses and made a case for new forms of play for children with casts.
Want to learn more about KitKast and its designers? Check out:
Diego Rivas’ post on the project process