Clayed

Project name: Clayed
Project duration: A week
Agenda: Adding a tangy twist to a mundane game.
Suitable for: 16 & Above age category

Content:
How to play?
Prototype
User testing

Overview:
Clayed is a handmade puzzle crafted with an intent to have sensorial play for adults. Although just 16 pieces, its abstract nature does the puzzle thing for the puzzler. Clayed makes one do more than thinking. Unlike normal puzzles this one has all its edges uneven. Clayed’s intention anchors on new ways of solving a puzzle. A puzzler can follow its uneven edges to connect pieces or make sense of the abstractness on it. Being baked, adjacent pieces with the same colour look different. Thus making every Clayed puzzle stand unique.

Motivation behind doing this project:
I have a friend who identifies as a Dissectologist, a person who plays and enjoys jigsaw puzzles. Having engaged with zillions of puzzles, he always projected need for a fresh breeze in the jigsaw puzzle category. He wanted something more than just pieces making a picture. Something more challenging than the mere count and size of pieces. It was his birthday and I was in hunt of a gift for him. Having worked A LOT around puzzles myself, I knew how mundane jigsaw puzzles were. In decades there was no innovation around them. Putting on those thinking caps and hunting answers for them WHYs came along, Clay.

How to play?

Like every other jigsaw puzzle.
Clayed comes with a reference image trying to give a little ease(not really) to the puzzler’s puzzled mind.

Although,

• Unlike other puzzles, Clayed’s colours WILL NOT exactly match its reference image. So that might not be the best way to follow.
• Puzzler will have to make sense of not only its abstract imagery but also of the continueous passed texture and unevenness of the pieces.
• Puzzler will have to be very carefully and smart with the pieces since Clayed sqaure pieces give it more permutations than a normal jigsaw.

Prototype

Reference Image for the puzzle

Making of Clayed