Award-winning design for the vision impaired

James Tan (Year 9) was recently invited to present his award-winning Sensory Cube, a Rubik’s style cube for vision impaired people, at the Vision Australia National Conference.

James joined CEO Ron Hooton and employees from around Australia (both in person and via Zoom) at Vision Australia’s head office in Kooyong. He designed this original cube completely from scratch for iDesign 2020 and was awarded top iDesign project for the year.

His cube was made from over 109 pieces and was designed on Autodesk Fusion 360 software and manufactured using 3D printing. The process took James over 200 hours and saw him create five prototypes with both a 2×2 and 3×3 layout.

His final design has interchangeable segments so the cube can be both a standard or textured version, depending on the end user’s needs.

CEO Ron Hooton was very impressed the Sensory Cube and is keen to work with James to help further develop his concept and test his product with vision impaired clients in the future.

James represented the School with both pride and passion and the level of complexity and understanding displayed by him was described by the CEO as well beyond expectation and right up with the standard seen in third year university students.

James was also given a personal tour of the specialised cutting edge products in the vision Impaired shop. His Sensory Cube would be right at home in the Vision Australia store so watch this space.

Learn more about why we’re an Innovative Schools 2020 winner and also why iDesign is an Innovative Schools 2018 award-winning program. 

Jamie Watson
Head of Faculty – Creative and Performing Arts
iDesign coordinator