P4 Development D2M

Right P4, and back to the drawing board. I contacted D2M (Design 2 Market) and had a consultation session with product designer Thomas Blundell, our main aim was to value engineer the components of the game to simplify it and create less tooling costs, with some further design development we managed to eliminate two component parts saving me over $10,000 in tooling fees!

The Final Execution

With D2M’s help it adapted the game into a really nice aesthetically pleasing product we have to date, we changed the mount design enabling both to fit into the underside of the bases in a slight offset recess, this not only reduced the amount of material in production but it gave the game a real functionality to pack everything away neatly. It made me think more and more about the practicality of the game the fact you could compact the game into such a small space, base being 260mm in diameter, due to this we decided to split the poles into 3 instead of 2 creating each pole length into 325mm, this seemed ideal and suddenly I could see this as a really easy and simple game that could be packed away into a small handy travel bag.

The Flying Disc

I’ve been thinking about the game for along time and it’s played on my mind multiple times whether to include a flying disc or not, the further the development got it seemed silly not to supply the game without one, knowing that the end customer would need to go and buy one on top of the product make no sense to me and it would put the customer off. Me being me I didn’t want to settle for a cheap mass produced frisbee with my logo on top, it had to be something special to match the neat execution of the design so far. I thought why not create a flying disc to fit in the base as well as the mounts, so this is where I really got my teeth in and started modelling and 3D printing frisbees after frisbee and testing them out in the park, I settled on version 11!!!