Posable Stuffed Toys

Spring 2026

As my Capstone design project at the University of Minnesota, I spent about eight weeks designing a project to help address a handful of problems that have been developing in childhoood development.

I interviewed parents, teachers, and children to get an understanding of what milestones they were hitting, and found that children were severely lacking in attention stamina and the skills necessary for independent play, in addition to struggling with physical tasks like fine motor control and strength.

The Posabuddies project aims to address these struggles by using fluffy stuffed animals with structured posability to encourage and prompt imaginative and exploratory play, while still putting the onus on the child to imagine plotlines and stories worth playing through.

Interviews

Alongside literature review, I interviewed 13 people, including parents, teachers, and children, over the course of a couple of weeks to understand the current conditions of child development. These interviews gave me several takeaways:

Kids love hands-on, open-ended toys like building systems.
Kids resonate with animals, and tend to hold on to stuffed animals even after discarding other toys.
Play stamina is low. Kids don't tend to maintain focus on a play style for long, and often are paralyzed by open-ended choice.
Teachers have concerns about learners' confidence. They're increasingly quick to give up if they don't already know a solution.
Motor skills are lagging, and affect confidence and connection.

So, how might we create a toy that helps to train imaginative and motor skills through child-motivated play?

Ideation

During ideation, I focused on exploring ideas compatible with what children seemed to resonate with most, and toys that fulfilled some or all of the goals I'd set out to achieve:

Open-ended systems
Compatibility with other toys
Animals as a core feature
Opportunity for motor development
Zero use of screens or electronics

Prototyping

I chose to design a posable stuffed rabbit as part of a larger collection of posable toys.

A large portion of the prototyping phase focused on 3D modeling as I refined the language of the bunny's internals. I focused on:

Strong posability to allow and sustain complex poses
Minimizing real estate to preserve coziness in the final stuffed toy
Grip width and strength to allow the toy to interface with real household items

Refinement

Refining the outward appearance of the character required character design inspired by other anthropomorphized characters in children's media.

I explored how pattern could highlight touch points, and how abstracting the "bones" of the design could limit sensory conflicts.

Drafting the sewing pattern for the toy took additional work, and required hand-stitching to allow construction around the internal armature. The pattern could later be optimized for more straightforward construction.

Final Concepts

While the project focused on the rabbit, the final concept also included a magnetic frog who shared similar internals to the rabbit, and a pair of magnetic, stacking bugs with velcro gloves.

The addition of these creatures to the character series allowed for a stronger ecosystem with more mechanisms to experiment with, and other unique characters empowered social play. Including characters like the bugs also allowed for an expanded range of availability at different price tiers.

Picture Book

When I presented this Capstone Project for the first time, I read it as a picture book. You can read that picture book below!

Josiah Teske - Updated Final Presentation.pdf

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse