Week 3 （1）

Toys. A symbol of childhood.

We questioned ourselves: How was it made, why was it made and for whom was it made? To get a better understanding of the very base of product design: consumers.

The Ricky rain frog I took from my friend today, was a soft toy from the brand Jelly cat; The majority of its consumer are kids and adults whose childish disposition remains. We had roleplay today, like our toy itself. Gigi’s doll has a broken leg and she describes it as ‘extreme pain.’ Throughout the process, we got empathy with the toys (or products) and it allow us to get better imaginations about their background (e.g. How old are you? Where are you come from?) Toys’ background is actually its production chain. From its born to its end, and of course, its owner was a critical part. There is a good question asked in our today’s class: Can we just dump our own toy in nature? An answer says: if environmental friendly then yes. This Q&A raised my awareness of our environment. Material for all products, but just about toys should be considered carefully by a product designer. How environment-friendly your product should be? What about the cost/ How should you charge your consumers?

I realized that product design is not just to design the most pleasing, exciting goods but also taking the product as a carrier to fulfil the request from consumers and consider our future as well. Product designer should process tons of thinking from every aspect of society (fiancé, sustainability, popularity…) in order to bring a product to our world, and makes it good.

In the last bit of our lesson, we took our toys apart. Before we did that, we wrote a presumptive number of the toys’ pieces. By doing this I found that the toys are much more complicated than I suppose. Uner its smooth shell, there are many units of electronic components, and without any of that, the toy would not function.

The crystallization of human wisdom would only cost you 10 pounds after industrialisation.

Part 2 Reflection

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