Latest Kwyjibo: Günther
Günther is made in antique navy thin-wale corduroy. His eyes and mouth are eco-felt, made of recycled plastic PET bottles. He is stuffed with long-grain brown Jasmine rice and foam fill. Go Günther.
The Kwyjibos have a bench!
I went down and trolled through the scrapwood bins in the woodshop downstairs yesterday so I could build the kwyjibos a bench for symposium. Now I just have to figure out how to make it look more distressed.
User Testing with Kwyjibos Lab v. 1.0
Currently, Kwyjibos Lab v. 1.0 has the following functionality:
- choose a body
- choose eyes
- choose a mouth
- choose legs
- choose arms
I got a handful of users to test out the functionality to get an idea of what’s not quite intuitive and what needs some help. The body still can’t rotate yet, but that should be up tonight. The scaling and rotation needs to be tweened/recalibrated a little bit so it doesn’t feel so abrupt. The legs and arms can probably be grouped into one general appendages gallery with scrolling. The left and right doesn’t work out enormously well, either. It seemed like users would just pick a left or right arm without getting an intuitive sense of how it would be oriented — whether oriented from their own perspective or from the creature’s perspective. Perhaps it would be easier if there were a “mirror” button, so that they could pick whatever appendage and place it, then hit “mirror” to get a copy that mirrored the one they’d just placed. Lastly, one thing that may also be necessary is the need for an “undo” or “erase” button. This may also be ameliorated by a null option for all appendages, if it’s tough to implement erasure or “undo last step.”
I need more intuitive instructions about what a user should do when they get to the site, as well, so they know immediately why they’re there and where to navigate next. I definitely need to have color. That was a bit glaring during testing. I think I will make each body and appendage type into a mask that reveals a photograph of the color/print swatch selection.
Fabric Samples
A few days ago, I took myself to garment district to go swatching for future Kwyjibos. Some of the things that I came up with that I really liked were sort of preppy knits and wovens that go into mens’ shirts.
I wonder if using these prints would be a bit too twee, or if it would lend something to the handmade-ness of the creatures. I think I’d like to experiment with seasonal fabrics, particularly as I found it a bit difficult to find good fabrics in the range of sweatshirt fleece and polar fleece in garment district. I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to source, even in April, but I’d have to do some research.
The Logo + Mascot + Cindy Rodriguez + The Branch
Over the weekend, I made the Kwyjibos logo in felt letters and stuffed them with long grain rice to give them weight. I couldn’t find just the right shade of green felt for the accents, but perhaps at some point, I’ll still be able to track it down. I thought it was of note that this felt is all recycled from post-consumer plastic bottles! I’m quite interested in the use of recycled or re-purposed materials, and it made me happy to see that this was new life for old PET bottles.
This is the mascot, currently hanging from my desk lamp. He is made of dunn sweatshirt fleece. His eyes, mouth, and legs are felt, and his bandit mask is jersey. His legs are structured with corset boning and stainless steel wire. I have yet to name him. It seems evil to leave him nameless for so long, but for some reason, nothing appropriate has surfaced. To his left is a new Kwyjibo I made yesterday. Her name is Cindy Rodriguez, and she is made of recycled hot pint thin-wale stretch corduroy, with muslin face framed in dark blue felt. She is stuffed with foam filler and long grain brown rice. It was a giant pain to get her legs to hang exactly down, with the curved seam at the bottom. That process will have to be perfected for future iterations.
I also managed to get a hold of a sweet branch at east river park. It’s currently lurking next to my fridge. Sadly, it’s not green, so it doesn’t have leaves growing out of it as I’d hoped, but at the very least, it’s not dying slowly in my apartment until symposium.
Build-a-Bear Workshop
There’s a Build-a-Bear Workshop on 46th and 5th Avenue. Generally, I avoid this area of town, but today, I thought it would probably be worth it for me to do a little primary research and figure out what the whole experience feels like. They’ve done a pretty good job. The animals themselves were a bit lackluster, in my opinion. The shapes are very conventional, but there is reasonable variety in the type of animal you create. I noted bears, dinosaurs, cats, dogs, even the Mets mascot dude. Each comes as a mostly-constructed “skin.” It’s the body without the stuffing, with an undone seam in the back, allowing you to stuff it to your desired softness and add sound. They have this insane stuffing machine. The look and feel of it is a bit like the a movie-theater popcorn machine: big windows, fluffy movement. There appears to be a mill inside the machine, fluffing and turning the stuffing material they use. The scary part is, there’s this metal tube that comes out of the side of this big, yellow, stuffing machine. This metal tube is inserted inside the open seam, and this machine pumps fluff into your chosen animal skin. It’s quite intense. It sounds like a vacuum cleaner on steroids. The appendages quickly puff to professionally-manufactured plumpness. You add a little plush heart and sound (if you want), and the gap is tightened with some twine that was already laced into the animal, it’s tied, and ready to go. The outfits are, unfortunately, really uncool, to my mind. I would never dress like that myself, but I can’t speak for the teddy bear community at large. Overall, it’s quite a nice experience. It’s a little surreal. I wanted to make one, but I didn’t want it myself, and I couldn’t think of anyone to give it to, so I left without making one, despite the fact that they gave me a $10 off coupon.
Sock Monkeys
Today I looked at the iconic sock monkey. Arne Svenson + Ron Warren published a book called sock monkeys, showing 200 of 1,863 of Ron Warren’s private collection of unique sock monkeys. The sock monkey phenomenon is one that combines themes of up-cycled materials (old socks!), D.I.Y., and customization to yield a ridiculous array of individual monkeyish creations. Each one is different, though generally one red heel would as the bum, the other cut to make a mouth, the sock ankle divided into arms and a nice tail, and the toe was often repurposed as a hat. Every one is different, the methodology loosely passed along via word of mouth, allowing even amateur sewers to make their own toys for themselves or a child.
Some Insight on the Mainstream Toy Market
I had a chat with Peter, who spent some time researching the plush market from the perspective of Mattel Toys. Mattel is the epitome of the mainstream toy market, having been responsible for making Barbie the iconic doll of our century. Here are a few things I gleaned from this conversation. The plush market is super-saturated. Differentiation does sell very well. It is hard to break in. There are three ways to approach the plush market from the vantage point of a large, branded toy manufacturer like Mattel:
- License a character (e.g., Mickey Mouse) — retailers like Wal-Mart carry a high volume of generic, un-branded soft toys that they can source from China and sell for 50-60% of what a branded toy manufacturer would charge
- Couple a plush toy with an interactive/online component (e.g., Webkinz) — provide a place online where the user can feed their toy online, or play educational games accompanying the toy, for example
- Collectible or customizable toys — toys that have an element of customizability or personalization –something like this might be Beanie-Babies or Build-a-Bear, where they where they sell the naked bear, but it’s really the accessories (e.g., shoes, clothes, glasses for the bear) that represent a higher-margin sell
This seems like it’s a step away from the more designer/artist toy that I’m aiming for at this point, but it’s a poignant set of considerations in developing an interface.
An additional point that Peter mentioned is the importance of storyline and narrative in creating play for children. Stories really resonate with kids, and the narrative behind, for example, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, where these teens had some sort of wacky accident with some green goo and some turtles made them amazing crime-fighting mutants, is a huge component of the success of such characters.
Primary Domains: Designer Toys + Mass Customization
Designer toys is a term used to describe toys and other collectibles that are produced in limited editions (as few as 10 or as many as 2000 pieces) and created by artists and designers. Designer toys are made of variety of materials; ABS plastic and vinyl are most common, although wood, metal, and resin are occasionally used. The term also encompasses plush, cloth and latex dolls. Creators of designer toys usually have backgrounds in graphic design, illustration or self-described low brow art; some are classically trained in art and design, while others are self-taught. Designer toys first appeared in the 1990s and are still in production today (via wikipedia).
The concept of mass customization is attributed to Stan Davis in Future Perfect. Tseng & Jiao (2001, p. 685) describe it as “producing goods and services to meet individual customer’s needs with near mass production efficiency”. No longer is production confined to the realms where mass production automatically means high volumes and low cost, and where customized production means low volume and high unit cost. The technology we are currently equipped with allows us to bring together the economies of scale characterized previously by mass-production and the capability to distribute customized goods.
