Toy Design

link to our slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zOSc_ZYksz5ZaOCgRIJbWjNCd7yMuHzlGkjDw_vEXws/edit?ts=5e5b4dfb#slide=id.g80dd142cda_15_3

 

for my research: Since my focus is on science toys and there are not so many academic (or even opinion) articles about spacifically this kind, I will only summary what I have found on the internet here.

Science toys have many variations that could cover some aspects of the fundamental science, like chemistry simulation toys, electric circuit building toys and magnetic experiment toys. There are another kind that simulate some real scenarios like fossil digging and microscopic experiments. 

Science toys has a long history that dates back to the early 20th century, and as a result it arries the same debate of genderization as most other toys (with similarly long history) do. At first, it was designed to prepare young boys for their possible future profession (of a scientist). This was the primary purpose of toys as a whole at that time, but it came a long way till nowadays and have changed a lot. Various advertistment nowadays are using words like “education” and “gain knowledge” often to seemingly emphasize the educational value of the toys. Other advertistments focus on “developing the interest” of real science. While these may not be appealing to the user themselves (i.e. the kids), it may seem more so to the parents who want their children well educated. Another big word in the ads is “creative”. This as a spplementry means, adds upon to the “education” point, just to make the idea of “gaining knowledge while playing” sound less boring. 

Question: Are these types of toys more centered on the objective of education or play?

I think it is neither of them. Firstly for those who don’t enjoy science stuff, there are no joy or excitement in playing those toys. And for those kids who are actually enjoying the science experiments, they usually won’t have enough patience to finish the instructions because it is written in languages of (inevitably,) science, which they would find boring and nerdy, which may lead to them goofing around with no achievement and subsequently quitting. So even if the intention for this kind of toy maybe for fun and play, the real affects may well not be it. It acts more like a introduction to the science world and shows the kids what’s out there for you to learn.

 

sketch for my character:

Lost Airpod

Reflections on the readings:

The first two readings are actually kinda cliche for me because yes they talk a lot about what are some of playing’s characteristics and what does playing bring to the human, but I don’t see them tackling (what i see being) the fundamental aspect of playing — for fun — all that much. Both of the articles seem to be trying to treat playing as if it was something that people have not been treating seriously, as if playing needs some sort of redemption. And I think playing is playing, despite that we might be having a million academic things to talk about it, we don’t have to. Despite all the benefits and underlying characteristics that play have, it is fundamentally for fun in the first place, at least for human. 

The last article does bring some more refreshing opinions describing situations that I have been in but not been paying attention to. When I was a kid I did realize that in the toy area of a shopping mall, there were boy sections and girl sections, and the color difference was VERY distinct. I always thought that that was the case forever, but I grew up noticing that there were some attempts to mix things up. For example the toys especially by some large companies like LEGO, are not as dictinct in terms of gender differentiation, and board games, educational toys also have less distinction. It is interesting to see how the attempts to balance gender inequality doesn’t necessarily impact the toy industry. It seems when thinking of the kids, the adults were following a whole other set of value system……

My definition of play:

Play for me is basically only for fun. I personally don’t buy the theory of “寓教于乐” which basically means that to learing usefull knowledge and skills while playing. Because in all of my experience ANY toy with that “寓教于乐” notion as an advertistment, I would find quite boring to play with after the first 2 minutes. The reason i think is that this kid of product is completly off track in terms of designing because when you focus too much on how to make the ad make sense on this toy you have to explore its educational value, and by doing so you put a (usually quite low) limit on the entertaining value because you are relatively paying less attention. So when designing the toy  your top priority should always be “how are the users going to have fun using this?”.

About my favourite toy:

My favourite toy, the masterpiece & year of Ma edition Optimus Prime action figure,  has that part of fun for me. I watched the G1 animation of transformers when I was little so having a transformers action figure has that nostalgic feeling to it. Also, the mechanism of the toy itself is designed to match the original look of the character both in his robot form and vehicle form. I have always wondered how the designers did such good job at the transforming of this toy. When I was a kid I would transform it over and over again just to see how the whole thing was dseigned, meanwhile pooling out my other toys and make a narrative storyline out of them. And now I usually just place it there in front of my desk and just apprciate how beautiful the design is. 

The target audience i would say is anyone who like the transformers IP and would wan to try transforming some of them on their own. There is still a fairly large market for them since this IP is always going to be in the public. 

I think the best connections between my toy and the readings are that by playing it as a kid, I really envoked my imagination of creating a story. Just as “Play Makes Us Human I: A Ludic Theory of Human Nature” mentioned, palying is “a basis for art, music, literature, theoretical science, religion, and all that we call “higher culture“. Because I found out later that when I was drawing the stick figure comics back in my middle school, I had the same feeling as when I was making stroies out of my toys. So I guess playing woth the toy did impact on my creation after all. And also “Play as a means of suppressing aggression” is true for current me because sometimes playing with the toy and watch every part going where it is supposed to be is just the most satisfying thing in the world and it genuinely saved me from going nuts because of homeworks.

At the end of the day, playing with robot make me more human than i have ever have lolll. 

my attemt on the first exercise.

I tried different patterns but still find the dots on the bottom left looking kinda good. Maybe I could change the top left pattern a little bit so that the lines “inside” the hand is more dense (to create a contradiction)

 

exercise 2 

Honestly I’m kinda proud of how this one turned out! Just as the prof. said I try to draw stuff on this whenever I have time and feel like doing so, I find this really relaxing.

 

 

 

About drawing.

I used to do pencil sketching when I was little but failed to continue after a short while. But that did leave me a little bit of basic skills (in fact, nothing more than sketching some straigh lines……).

And also I drew stick figure when I was in Middle school. I have some pics for that. Me and several of my classmates even did a comic strip together lol.

also for fitting the title “design and prototyping” of this course i pretty much designed and prototyped all of my projects from last semester in inter lab. i sketched them on the paper about how big each piece of the thing will be, how to insert the sensors into the device and how to assemble the whole thing together and stuff like that. those were very detailed sketches and i think i have some of the pictures of them still available in my inter lab documentation website.