home  

Toybox

BDes: Year Four Research Project
Nominated for Newberry Medal at Glasgow School of Art

casing top down
wood panel shape
messy inner workings


Toybox aimed to explore Joyous Design, the holistic method of design that contributea to audioware products situated as toys rather than tools. Touching on conceptual themes such as: interaction design, aesthetics of glitch art, granular synthesis and children’s toys - as well as technical design aspects such as circuit design, digital signal processing, embedded audio systems and the fabrication and processing of FDM 3D prints.

This project highlights how low cost digital tools and fabrication methods - such as the daisy seed and 3d printers, can enable novice or independent designers to create complex digital audio systems. Toybox concludes by identifying design strategies that support playful engaging experiences in audio hardware, contributing to wider conversations about interaction design.

Sound Demo and Explanation:



Toybox is run on a Daisy Seed microcontroller, made by Electrosmith. The effect was programmed in PlugData, an open source development environment based on PureData. Containing a built in compiler, PlugData makes it very seamless to prototype, flash to the seed, and then test.

The pedal contains four dials, four toggle switches, two footswitches and two faders. Each paramater was chosen/designed to interact well with their respective control surfaces. For example, having the dry/wet parameter on a linear scale, makes it easy to quickly glance and see where the ratio lies.

By assigning multiple sonic parameters to certain control surfaces, I aimed to abandon the technical one-to-one control method in favour of a more novel, toy-like approach.


The circuit is very simple, containing stereo input and output buffers, the seed, a small power input regulation circuit and the control surfaces.

The pedals circuit was built onto multiple parts of perfboard. This was a cheap option but also allowed for more customiseability than something like PedalPCBs Terrarium, which only supports a certain number of predetermined control surfaces as well as mono input and output audio.

Toybox has two component boards, each holding two toggle switches and two rotary potentiometers. The slide potentiometers and footswitches are wired directly to the motherboard, which contains the seed, power regulation, input buffer and output buffer.