“Designing a new toy to fit other toy pieces: a shape-matching toy design based on existing building blocks” by Igarashi and Suzuki

Shape-matching toys are popular items for infants, and consist of boxes with many holes in different shapes along with corresponding blocks of the same shapes. To play with the toy, an infant finds and inserts a block matching the shape of a particular hole. It is difficult to design new shape-matching toys based on existing blocks. We assume that the user performs such design as shown in Fig. 1 (e) based on existing building blocks like those shown in Fig. 1 (a). The construction of the toy body can be roughly divided into three steps: gather the parts, lay them out on a wooden board and trace them using a pencil, and saw the wooden board. This manual method is straightforward, but errors cannot be rectified and it is also unsuitable for mass production. Accordingly, we propose the use of a laser cutter (e.g., Commax Laser System) or a cutting plotter (e.g., Craft ROBO). Today, services are available that allow the user to send a vector dataset to a company and have the corresponding wooden board returned to them.

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