TRILATERALS

A modular fort building kit made out of recycled materials

Role: Design Lead | Timeframe: 8 weeks | Year: 2019

Problem: How might we use Nike Grind Materials to create a sustainable product that can enable a circular economy of Nike shoes?

Approach: I aimed to create a simple, reusable design to be fabricated out of recycled EVA foam from Nike Grind to help establish a larger circular economy that keeps shoe materials from ending up in the landfill. 

Solution: The final design is a 20 piece set of 30-60-90 triangles (18” by 31.77” by 36”) with assorted connector pieces. The cutouts of the triangles make them lightweight and easy for a child to manipulate while allowing light to shine through the finished fort. Each angle connector can be used to create a variety of shapes, which allows for a range of creativity in fort designs. We tested a cardboard prototype with 4 children, ages 2, 6, 6, and 7 to see if the fort kit is something that children would want to play with and found that kids love Trilaterals!

This project was conceived for a class on sustainability at the University of Pittsburgh: CEE1618 Design for the Environment. An early iteration, seen above, included holes that could be tied together at any angle, which I iterated to conserve material. In later designs, the square pieces seen in the background above were abandoned because of the lack of creative shapes that they make. Using a 30-60-90 triangle instead of squares allows kids to build rectangles without confining them to the obvious cube blueprint that a square piece inspires. My team reached out to Nike during this project to see if they could provide us with a sample of their recycled EVA foam but they were unable to at the time. However, going forward I envision that Trilaterals can be fabricated with die cutting techniques to conserve the most material.