Remaining playful.

It’s just struck me, after many hours trying to get an Apple iPod to accept itself as the iPod it is, never before imagining electronic gadgets needed therapy, that I have never spoken about my previous employ as a toy designer. There are many rules regarding toy design. First, never make anything in green. I don’t know why, perhaps it’s the young’s aversion to vegetables. It seems to take a good 30 years before they come to terms with the natural world. Before that its red, blue and yellow, changing to black, chrome and magenta as they move into double figures. But never green. Second, toys must be collectable. I don’t know if they’re born avaricious bastards but they sure are after years of pleading for Barbies and Transformers to add to their collections. It is after all natural, like our need for a never-ending rise in GDP. The fact that the whole world will end up looking like one big child’s bedroom floor doesn’t seem to deter us. Thirdly, the ratio of perceived value over actual cost must be greater than 1, preferably much greater. Thus a gold plated potato is far more attractive, provided the gold is so thinly applied as to not add to the cost. Fourthly, a toy should provide maximum satisfaction from the minimum of effort. It is a toy designers dream to produce a button that when pressed will create a full-scale copy of the Taj Mahal. With working water feature. There are others, like never underestimate a child’s ability to blackmail its parents, make eyes as big as possible etc, but these are less important. So the toy industry is leading the way in making your children lazy, acquisitive, facile and disassociated with things natural. And I bet you thought toy designers were nice people. But we do remain playful, which is a great asset.