Meet Hexter:
Hexter is what our instructors call an “Interactive Object for Children” or put more simply, it’s a toy with constructive qualities that encourages children to play in an intellectual way. The hope with our project is that the children will become inspired to build, communicate and play, and in the end they’ll have come up with a spectacular, sculptural construction.
I like Hexter, it’s the object that our design collective has been working on since the beginning of this semester. Three months in the making, we have a polished object that meets all the criteria of our project, and oh my god is it a clever little thing. In addition to qualifying for all of the components that are required for the project (manufactured on a pin router, made from plywood, bears a 2-D graphic that has been screenprinted onto the wood) I feel as though this project also exibits qualities of Dieter Rams’ 10 commandments of good design. I bring these up time and time again, but I still consider these rules to be of utmost importance when it comes to my work in design.
Earlier today I was browing through my google reader and I stumbled upon a post from kottke called “The business of parenting” which floored me a bit. I’m not a parent and not particularly interested in becoming one within the near future, so I haven’t been truly surrounded by the lifestyle. Beyond my research on interactive play and childrens’ behaviour for the Hexter project, I wasn’t paying too much attention to the influx of madness that seems to be going on in the spectrum of parents, babies, and cosmopolitan consumption. From the Salon article that kottke referenced, one quote in particular stuck out to me:
“Everyone thinks: “Toys need to be interactive.” No, toys don’t need to be interactive. Children need to interact with toys. The best toys are 90 percent kid, 10 percent toy…”
So I’m going to throw something out there, to my instructors at Emily Carr and to parents who would consider purchasing something like Hexter in the future: As a guardian, you should concern yourself more with buying toys that will allow your kids to interact, as opposed to buying toys that will interact with your kids. In the context of this project, my collective was focused at first to create an object that would coax kids to interact with it, and in a way that wasn’t too terrible of an idea- but it is very basic, very one-point-oh. Our first iterations involved providing kids with stimulation visually, or giving them a space to customize by themselves. However, our final iterations were more involved with giving them an object with which to customize their space. Instead of the object being interactive, our object inspires interactivity. That’s kind of huge, and in a way I don’t think we quite realized that quality as being extraordinarily important until after we started playing with the object, ourselves.
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Comments ( 1 Comment )
sooooo…i totally want one of those. is that weird? if you guys end up producing any of these, i call dibs!
Ariane added these pithy words on
Mar 31 08 at
17:59