Design, development and manufacture of Blank

Blank  was featured in Design Week, highlighting the innovative design of the game.

 Visually the game has a very satisfying appearance akin to a piece of sculpture or architecture. Yet, Blank was created as a fully functional engineering device.

We developed the basic idea for the game using small pieces of paper, some with letters written on, some left blank.  We then had to decide how to to select the letters for the final product.

On weighing up the very many alternatives we decided to create a special track (we now term the LetterSelector) to select the letters for the game. The letters would be held on special chips that raced around the track.  No such design had been attempted before so it was a huge challenge to develop something unique for our game. Several prototypes were created.  Firstly the track was made from pieces of plastic cut from old stacker - box lids.  The chips were made from plastic rod cut into discs.

The layout of the track was first drawn in 2D and sections of the track were built to 'feel' the resistance to the chips sliding to determine whether the friction in the overall track would be too great.  The overall size of the track and chips was determined by a mixture of drawing and model building. Other sections of the track were built to test the interactions between the rails and chips, to investigate how the chips could be kept in the desired orientation.

The complete figure of eight track was built by hand which indicated that the idea in it's entirety would work well.  This was a massive task because the track had to be built with some accuracy to mimic the final product.  The walls, rails, floor, roof etc. had to be positioned exactly.

We play-tested the game ourselves to see if the mechanism and preferred letter apportionment would suffice.

The track was then drawn in 3D using a CAD package, partitioning the track into sections that would be easy to injection mould, would assemble together exactly and would allow for small adjustments. From these drawings the first (FDM) prototypes were made.  These were done in ABS plastic to give a  physical approximation to the final product, its' mechanical strength, durability etc.  This indicated that the track would work well.  Again the device was play tested to identify any problems.

Obvious adjustments were made, then more accurate (SLA) prototypes were created using the same drawings.  SLA offers pinpoint accuracy in recreating the dimensions of drawings so it is good to use for final adjustments.  The projections on the chips had to meet pick up points within a fraction of a millimetre.  When we were happy with the results the amended drawings were used to generate the tool paths and electrodes for forming the injection mould tooling.

Two different types of printing were used in the manufacture. The score system is printed onto the LetterSelector using a  screen printing technique. The letters are printed onto the chips by using a pad printing technique with a special jig to hold the chips in place.

We decide to use very modern packaging i.e. a laptop style hinged case to match the look of the track inside.  This again took a lot of engineering but we wanted a classy finish, not a low cost look.

Our Oxford based business is now expanding.  We started selling into Britain. Now we're looking at Europe and further a field.  The game is made in Britain. The mould tools and rigs for assembly were also made in England.