Oliverblythe's Blog
Parents
Leave a Comment
This is a great company, but at this stage I’m having difficulty finding their website (if they have one at all). But I’ve found lots of their products on other sites, so I thought I would post some of them up here, cos they’re really great.
Leapfrog
Leave a Comment
This is a great toy company: they have a pretty strong focus on the learning aspect to toys. Great aesthetics
Good Resource
Leave a Comment
This site is pretty good resource site: it’s got some pretty good links, and has some useful information on the actual site itself too. It’s looking specifically at kids with disabilities, rather than toys that suit everyone, but it’s still really useful for that side of the project
Useful Site
Leave a Comment
I found this site useful mainly for the bullet points down near the bottom: just a few good ideas as to how to help make it universal and easy to use
http://www.allied-services.org/specialtyservices/toy_adaptive.php
A few Books
Leave a Comment
I managed to borrow a couple of books from the library. One is about a guy called Kurt Naef, who is the creator of a toy making company called ‘Naef.’ I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet, so I’ll post about him again later on. And the other is pretty much just a visual collection of heaps and heaps of toys, mostly ‘designer toys.’ I’m not really interested in designing ‘designer toys’ but it’s still been pretty useful, just to give a bit of an idea of the current trends in the toy market. I’m hoping to get a chance to scan in some particularly interesting designs by Naef over the next few days, just to show a few of the ones that are particularly relevant to inclusive-ly designed toys.
Oh, and the names of the books are: ‘Der Spielzeugmacher (The Toymaker)’ and ‘Toys: New Designs from the Art Toy Revolution’
Stages of Development
Leave a Comment
This was really helpful in terms of when kids would use the toy: basically instead of thinking of it in terms of age, it should be thought of in terms of 3 different ’stages.’ The first one is the ‘experience stage,’ the second one is the ‘discovery stage’ and the third one is the ‘expanding imagination stage.’
The Inspiring Site
Leave a Comment
This is the site that helped get me thinking about how I should approach the semester. As well as being a great site in itself, it’s also a great resource: there are heaps of great links etc which branch off of it, which has really helped me get moving on the research side of my work.
Initial Summary of Idea
Leave a Comment
So I’ve now made my blog and I’m gonna start uploading all of my links etc out of the Word document I’ve been using. But before I do that I thought I’d give an initial summary of what I’m planning on doing over the semester/year.
I always wanted to do some kind of toy, but i was unsure as to how it fit in (if it fit at all) with Inclusive design. So I started researching and looking for information to help me find out, and ended up coming across this amazing sight which pretty much inspired me as to how to approach the project. Just to quote the bit that inspired me:
“Toys must be made available that are accessible, flexible and adjustable so that all children can use them. An inclusive toy design will promote its use by all children when playing alone or together.”
So basically what I’m interested in looking at over the rest of the semester/year is how to design a toy that can be used by anyone (oh, and for my work I’m planning on treating the ‘anyone’ as ‘any kids’) no matter whether they are able bodied or not, or have some kind of mental disability. This might mean that different people use the final toys at different ages (as their motor skills develop) but it will still be usable by everyone.
That’s just a rough summary of what I’m hoping to look at over the rest of the semester, and it will no doubt develop and become more informed as i go along, but I wanted to start off my blog with my initial thoughts, so that I can look back at the end and see how the project has developed.
