Design for Playing

When his son's second birthday was approaching, a free-lance industrial design consultant named A. F. (for Arnold Ferdinand) Arnold went shopping for toys to give the boy. "I found there was a dearth of creative toys," says Arnold. "Either they were very cold and sterile toys developed through clinical tests, or else they were so damn cute that a child got no fun out of them."

Designer Arnold decided to do something about it. He built his son a hobby horse with a removable head which could be replaced with heads of other animals. It was so popular that Arnold decided to go in seriously for toy design. Last week Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art was showing the results of three years' work by Arnold. On view were a galleryful of ingenious toys, designed with a double purpose: to please the child and develop his esthetic sense. As Arnold explains it: "No child is born with taste. It's up to the parents to protect their children from bad taste just as they try to protect them from disease; bad taste is a disease."

Among the most tasteful Arnold-designed items on display:

P: A Numbers Mobile to teach the child both arithmetic and art appreciation. To make the mobile balance, the child must hang a number of small Masonite disks on one side to match corresponding numerical figures on the other. The big numbers are larger and heavier than the small ones, thus require more disks to balance the mobile.

P: Space People--imaginative and humorous conceptions of beings from other planets. Pieces are put together on a string which the child can twirl to make the toy wave its arms or jiggle its legs.

P: A Three-Dimensional Jigsaw Puzzle, which teaches the child to think things out for himself and manipulate forms in three dimensions. A companion piece is the Three-Dimensional Color Puzzle which the child fits together by matching colors.

P: Joggle Toys, intended as permanent wall decorations in the playroom. Dangling from each figure (e.g., kangaroo, horse and rider, quacking duck) is a string which, when pulled, sends the wall toy into action. The Joggle Toys were designed as an answer to the problem of decorating a child's room, which Arnold sees as "either throw-uppy cute wallpaper or nothing."

P: Wrap-Around Designs for manufacturers' cartons with which children can convert plain cardboard cartons into trains, boats, houses, cars and airplanes.

Designer Arnold has already signed contracts with several manufacturers to turn out some of his artistic toys on a mass-production basis, and hopes that they will be on the retail market in early 1954. Arnold thinks his toys will go a long way toward releasing children's creative talents, which have been clogged by too many toys "that are just miniature models of real things." Adults, says Arnold, love such realistic gadgets as a miniature train with all the details of the real thing; many young children may find them frustrating. Says Arnold: "The more realistic the toy, the more you limit the child's play. A child is never concerned with reality."

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