JOSH WALL/

University of Newcastle coursework

Tactile music puzzle

Designed a 3D puzzle that a visually impaired user could solve more easily than a sighted one, and produced a walkthrough video. The brief called for at least four separable components and multiple valid solutions within a 200 × 200 × 200 mm volume.

2021 · Fusion · Mechanism design · Cues by touch, weight, and sound

Tactile music puzzle model with its walls removed: four cylinders with coloured ends, each turned to a different angle, and four coloured handles whose knurled grips carry one to four coarse bands to give their order

What I did

  • Designed four interchangeable music cylinders encoded with sections of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”.
    • When all four cylinders were placed in the correct order, the puzzle played the entire song.
    • Two cylinders played the same repeated bars, as in the sheet music, so more than one arrangement was a valid solution.
  • Designed the puzzle so that sight was a distraction while touch and sound gave dependable information. The cylinder order was revealed by:
    • Coarse-textured bands on the handles, deliberately miscoloured.
    • Embedded weights in the cylinders, the heaviest on the bottom axle.
    • Braille reading “Ode to Joy”, while the printed text used the formal, less familiar title.
    • The music itself.
  • Explored accessibility as an information-design problem using:
    • Orientation magnets at the cylinder ends, so each cylinder could go in only one way.
    • Oval axles that set the rotational orientation on insertion, so the steel comb could not damage the raised points.

Model

The music box puzzle mechanism in three dimensions, viewed from above one corner