Toy Design
&
Prototyping
&
Prototyping
Week 1
Draw your playing experience with your favorite toy, post the drawing and answer the next questions:
- Why is/was this your favorite toy?
- Do you find any connections between drawing, toys, and playing?
- How would you define Toys and Play? (just from your own understanding, do not look for definitions)
This is a drawing of me playing with my favorite toys ( the Hot Wheels Cars) . I imagine the sofa as a giant arena, where each car is a gladiator competing in a collision battle to determine winners and losers. The winners and losers are separated by a pillow. Only the cars in the winners' group have the chance to go onto the Hot Wheels track and head underground (which means the floor) for the next battle.
I also created an image using Canva to illustrate how I play.
Generated by Canva.
I enjoy playing with Hot Wheels cars mainly because of the influence of the movie Cars. The movie tells the story of Lightning McQueen's efforts to win the race, and every car has its own unique personality and appearance, almost like they are human. As a child, my imagination led me to create countless different stories for these cars.
In addition, Hot Wheels cars are easy to play with and require no learning curve. They are made of sturdy metal with a hard shell, making a crisp sound when they collide, and they don’t get damaged. Each car’s wheels have different tightness, which gives them varying speeds, making the play experience both fun and challenging. Over time, Hot Wheels has released more and more types of cars, each designed to be very detailed and cool. For me, such toys not only spark imagination but also have an artistic appeal, which is why I love them so much.
From my point of view, playing with toys is essentially playing with your own imagination, where toys serve as a medium, but the real driving force behind play is our thoughts and creativity. When playing with toys, our minds automatically fill in scenes, effects, and characters, bringing simple objects to life. For example, assigning personalities to dolls or imagining toy cars as racers—this is essentially a way of actively constructing a world.
Drawing, on the other hand, is another form of "play", as it visualizes what exists in our imagination. Just like building a story with toys, drawing is about creating a world using a pen and paper. Looking deeper, both drawing and playing with toys are forms of "playing"—they both involve using imagination to give objects new meanings and expressing those ideas through our hands, whether by sketching on paper or interacting with toys.
So, perhaps we could say:
Drawing = "playing" with imagination using a pen, while playing with toys = "drawing" imagination using hands.
When we think of toys, we often associate them with children playing, which leads me to consider the biggest difference between children and adults when thinking about the definition of toys. In common understanding, the process of growing up is seen as one of losing imagination. Adults tend to become more pragmatic, needing practical feedback, and therefore are less inclined to create. This is my personal understanding, further research is needed. Based on this perspective, I believe that toys are objects or items that serve as tools for creative expression and imagination. They are not just things to play with, but also mediums through which we can build, explore, and interact with the worlds we create in our minds. They may represent real or imagined things, but their primary role is to spark and allow the involvement of imagination.
The essence of play is to experiment, create narratives, and understand things in an open-ended way. It is not necessarily constrained by rules or structure, but driven by curiosity and imagination.
Slinky
2025.2.10