Design for Kids - Snack Hat

Originally posted at http://stanfordmakersclub.ning.com/profiles/blogs/designing-for-kids-snack-hat

Rachel Lopatin and Sam King made a snack hat.

Our child wanted a hat with three features:

1. It would be green, his favorite color

2. He could keep it stocked with raisins so that he would always have a snack on hand

3. There would be an umbrella attached to it.

We initially worked on getting the snack part working. We made a cardboard box and experimented with ways of keep it closed tight enough that snacks wouldn't be able to escape.

Our initial attempts involved some form of flap that would go over the box, held down by gravity and tape. Unfortunately, in our tests, none of them were resilient enough to withstand an energetic kid.

Our next design used powerful magnets to keep everything together, and that proved much better. No matter how much dancing around, leaning over, or even shaking the box while the flap was facing down, the magnets were enough to keep it closed. We used foam board, green felt, tape, and magnets for the box and hat.

Finally, we added the umbrella. After doing this, we discovered that the umbrella weighed enough that it unbalanced the whole thing regardless of how we positioned it. In the above picture, it was standing on its own, but it is difficult to walk around without supporting it. Since we bought the lightest umbrella that we could find and it was still too heavy, we decided that an umbrella hat wasn't the most realistic thing, so we made the umbrella detachable. That way, it has the novelty of an umbrella hat while still retaining the utility of a snack hat.