DejyrKlep

12/01/2022

12/01/2022

Block party: how architecture helped rebuild LEGO
Virtually any kid who picks up a bucket of LEGO bricks will start by making a house, usually in mismatched, rainbow colours, maybe featuring a few of the little plastic minifig people. It seems almost too obvious to state that LEGO brings out the architect in all of us; but what has iconic architecture brought to LEGO?

Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safde set the world of architecture alight with his Habitat 67 community housing project for Montreal’s Expo 67, and he used LEGO bricks to do the initial planning. And it shows:

Montreal’s Habitat 67 housing project. Wikimedia Commons
The connection between LEGO – founded in Denmark in 1934 – and architecture is a long one, and the original LEGO plastic set in 1957, called Town Plan No. 1, allowed kids to make a gas station, a hotel and other town buildings.

The Sydney Opera House joined New York’s Empire State Building and Seattle’s Space Needle as a model in the LEGO’s 2012 Architecture range. AAP Image/James Morgan
Many of the early LEGO sets are based around buildings of various sorts, whether they’re the firehouses and police stations in the early Town (and later City) theme released in 1978, or the elaborate keeps and dungeons in the Castle series.

LEGO tried to capitalise on the interest in buildings by releasing some sets designed especially for architects in the 1960s but these were a commercial failure. The company quickly refocused its attention on kids, especially boys aged five to 12, with sets that featured cars, spaceships and, eventually, Star Wars.

Trouble in LEGOLAND

AAP Image/Supplied by LEGO Star Wars
But in the early 2000s a couple of strange things happened. First, LEGO started to lose money – a lot of money – as its key demographic of young boys began switching to video games, and other diversions more interactive than plastic construction bricks.

The once family-run company was forced to bring in an outside CEO for the first time, and began to think hard about what new markets it might tap to start making up the shortfall.

Second, it noticed that it had a lot of adults who liked to build with LEGO. These “Adult Fans of LEGO” or “AFOLs” became important to the company, and one of them in particular came to the attention of the Danish brand.

His name was Adam Reed Tucker, and he loved to build huge recreations of celebrated buildings from his hometown of Chicago.

When he pitched his idea of a premium series of sets that featured well-known architectural icons, LEGO was just desperate enough to let him try it. The result was the 2008 release of the first set in the LEGO Architecture range, a 69 brick reconstruction of the Sears Tower.

Sears Tower. Brandon Cripps
Doubts quashed
Any doubts LEGO might have had about the product were quashed when half the initial run sold out in ten days, and a new way of thinking was born within the company.

Rather than selling kits to kids and their parents in toy stores, adults can now pick up architectural models of the White House or the Brandenburg Gate in galleries and museum gift stores across the world.

Adults can now pick up architectural models of the White House or the Brandenburg Gate in galleries and museum gift stores across the world. Ronny Nussbaum
There are now around 20 architecture sets, all designed by Tucker. It’s the rare architect’s studio that doesn’t feature a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater or Robie House, and there is a flourishing sub-culture of YouTube videos starring stop-motion of the models being assembled.

Farnsworth House stop motion.
The more ambitious of these include remarkable combinations of stop-motion and computer graphics.

Fallingwater stop motion, now with added water!
The success of the series has led to the company’s most recent foray into this space, the LEGO Architecture Studio. Released a couple of months ago in the US, it comprises more than 1,200 bricks, all of them white or clear.

Unlike the other sets in the series, this set isn’t about copying any one building in the mimetic style of play that LEGO has adopted in the last few years.

Instead, the set comes with a 272 page book with some fundamental architectural principles such as designing with mass and density, negative space, and so on. It also comes with endorsements from brand-name architectural practices such as SOM, MAD Architects and Sou Fujimoto Architects, together with the implicit exhortation to build models as interesting as buildings by these renowned architects.

It’s not just the modern architectural greats – LEGO fans can also buy models of ancient buildings such as the Taj Mahal. aldisley
This type of set hearkens back to the earliest days of LEGO, when the founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, dreamed of building a system of play that would allow children to build openly and imagine their own versions of the world. LEGO is, after all, a contraction of the Danish expression leg godt, or “play well”.

Of course, it’s not children who will be playing well with the Architecture Studio’s monochromatic blocks. It will be architects, architecture students and other AFOLs.

Because the sets are aimed at adults, LEGO has come to accept that each new release will be greeted with some degree of snarkiness. Among the AFOLs, the criticism has long been that the Architecture series is overpriced at around US$150 for a Studio set – about twice as much as children’s sets with the same number of bricks.

LEGO has paid tribute to New York’s Empire State Building with a model and a King Kong minifig. Pedro Vezini
Among architects, the all-white bricks seems to have found favour; and no, it wasn’t just that the LEGO designers wanted to emulate minimalists such as Richard Meier or John Pawson. White is the only colour that didn’t evoke a well-known building product, such as red for bricks, or black for granite.

We mere mortals can now design and build our own architectural designs, as well as mimic famous ones such as the Empire State Building. And LEGO has introduced a competition to let us vote on which iconic building should be immortalised by Adam Reed Tucker in the next Architecture series set.

Just don’t expect too much. Moshe Safde’s Habitat 67 won the most votes in the 2012 competition, but the company decided not to release a set based on the quirky design.

“We can’t promise to build it,” the firm said, “but we do promise to be inspired by you.”

12/01/2022

There’s no good reason to push pink toys on girls
You only have to walk down the aisle of a toy shop to see that young girls really love pink. This has some parents worried. They are concerned that pink is bad for their daughters.

One engineer in the US is so frustrated with pink toys for girls that she has founded her own toy company that encourages girls to embrace the skills associated with engineering. A video by the company last week shows an army of young girls storming the “pink aisle” of a toy shop.

As a neuroscientist, I’m interested why certain toys are embraced by different genders. Why do girls embrace pink dolls, while boys play with vehicles of pretty much any colour, as long as it is not pink? The answers reveal both how humans develop, and how societal pressures act upon children.

Inborn preferences
The gendered preference for dolls versus trucks seems to have an inborn element. Male and female fetuses develop in somewhat different hormone environments, and this influences their later toy preferences. The te**es of male fetuses begin producing testosterone at about week eight of gestation, whereas female fetuses’ ovaries do not. Consequently, male fetuses have higher levels of testosterone.

Girls with a disorder that causes their adrenal glands to produce high levels of testosterone choose to play with toys like vehicles and other boys’ toys more than other girls do, and they are less interested in dolls and other girls’ toys.

Similarly, normal variability in testosterone in infancy relates to later toy preferences. Testosterone measured in the urine of typically developing infants at ages one to six months predicts gendered behaviour, including interest in dolls and trains. Even monkeys show gender based toy preferences similar to those seen in children. If given s*x-typed toys, female monkeys spend more time with the girls’ toys, and male monkeys spend more time with the boys’ toys.

It is not too surprising that female monkeys like dolls, given that they give birth and do most of the parental caring. Why would a male monkey choose a car though? The theory is that testosterone influences brain development to increase interest in vehicles, and that this is part of our evolutionary history, even though this history occurred before cars existed. These findings have led people to rethink the role of toys in children’s development.

In the pink: girls need a healthier relationship with colour. Goldie Box
Rose-coloured glasses
What are the fundamental properties of s*x-typed toys that make them differentially interesting to girls versus boys? It does not seem to be colour or shape, because infants of both s*xes like reddish colors and rounded shapes more than they like bluish colors and angular shapes. We are now trying to determine if boys like toy vehicles, because they like to watch things moving in space.

Pink is a different story. The s*x-typed preference for pink emerges after preferences for dolls and vehicles. Babies aged 12-24 months already show s*x-typed toy preferences, with girls showing greater interest in dolls and boys showing greater interest in cars. At this age, however, both girls and boys prefer pink and red over blue. Girls’ preference for pink emerges at about the age of three years, and could be acquired socially as adult colour preferences are.

Because girls spend their early years playing with pink toys, and enjoying these toys, they may come to like pink. The age at which a preference for pink emerges also coincides with children’s acquisition of the understanding that they are girls or boys. At about this age, they are searching for information about what people of their own gender do and like. Girls see that girls like pink and that they like to play with dolls. So they adopt gendered toy preferences, as well as colour preferences.

Toying with kids’ futures
Children are also influenced by social reinforcement encouraging gendered behaviour. Parents, peers, teachers and strangers respond differently to girls and boys when they choose to play with dolls or vehicles, or choose things that are pink. Just think of the different reactions to a child playing with a doll if he was a boy, rather than a girl. These patterns of reinforcement apply particularly to boys, who are steered away from girlish things.

Girls outgrow pink, and, in adulthood, both men and women prefer blue to pink. What harm might the gender segregation of pink and pink things in early childhood have done though? Toys provide learning opportunities for children. Playing with dolls and other girls’ toys, such as tea sets, is thought to foster the development of verbal and social skills.

Later in life, females outperform males on tests of writing ability. Perhaps steering boys away from girls’ toys, by colouring them pink and ridiculing boys for playing with them, denies them important learning opportunities. Similarly, toy cars may foster the acquisition of spatial skills that males excel at, but if pink is for girls and these toys are not pink, girls may lose these learning opportunities.

Boys gravitate toward cars, whereas girls gravitate toward dolls, and this is a product of nature as well as nurture. We can’t do much about the nature bit, but we can change nurture.

Colour coding toys to limit their appeal to both s*xes nurtures limitation rather than possibility. Parents are right to be worried about the obsession with pink for girls.

12/01/2022

What’s behind the fidget spinner fad?
When I asked a colleague if he knew about fidget spinners, he responded: “I’d never heard of them until last week, when my daughter told me she had to have one.”

Many parents must be having that conversation with their elementary school-age kids; as of this writing, fidget spinners held the top 16 spots in Amazon’s rankings of the most popular toys, and 43 of the top 50. Add fidget cubes (a spinner cousin), and fidget toys hold 49 of the top 50 rankings.

Fidget spinners, it seems, have become this year’s leading toy fad. I’m a sociologist who has studied fads, and the rapid popularity, media attention and concerns over a new toy craze are a familiar story. As for adults’ confusion about the purpose of the fidget spinner – for many kids, that’s probably part of its appeal.

Don’t know what a fidget spinner is? Not to worry – most people who aren’t in touch with school-age children don’t have a clue. (When I asked a class of 30 college students, only two knew what they were.)

A fidget spinner has two or three paddle-shaped blades attached to a central core. Squeeze the core, give the blades a flick and they spin. That’s it. With a price between US$3 and $4 and available in all sorts of color schemes, many children can carry around a pocketful.

Some tricks of the trade.
Fidget spinners have attracted all sorts of commentary. Some schools have banned them as a distraction, and there are worries that they may disrupt students’ learning. Others argue that fidget spinners can calm special needs students. But most simply categorize them as a craze or fad – the most recent in a long line of toys that children have swarmed to.

The hula hoop is probably the most famous. Over the course of a few months in 1958, an estimated 25 million were sold – enough so that every child in America between the ages of five and 11 could have owned one. Soon, however, most hula hoops stopped spinning and began collecting dust. Similar toys fads include troll dolls, super balls, Rubik’s cubes, Beanie Babies and jelly bracelets.

It’s impossible to predict which toys will become the focus of faddish enthusiasm. It helps if the price tag falls within a child’s budget, if it’s small enough to be brought to school and if it appeals to both boys and girls. But these aren’t hard and fast rules. Cabbage Patch Kids ($25 – equivalent to about $60 today) hit it big in 1983 when frustrated, holiday present-buying adults competed for the limited supply of dolls in stores. (They were eventually issued “adoption certificates” that could be exchanged for the dolls when production runs caught up with demand.)

A happy customer displays his newly purchased Cabbage Patch Kid doll in 1983 as he leaves a South Bellingham, Massachusetts storefront crowded with people hoping to make a similar purchase. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Adults are often ambivalent about children’s fads. Some get caught up in the enthusiasm, like those who invested in the Beanie Baby bubble, convinced that the toys could only grow more valuable with each passing year. (They didn’t.)

Others try to read meanings into toy fads. Progressives might worry that children are being exploited, separated from their allowance money by “Big Toy” marketers. (“Wouldn’t it be better if children played with wooden blocks, instead of commercialized plastic?”)

And conservatives might fear that toys will corrupt children’s values. During the jelly bracelet craze, some claimed that those thin rings of plastic gel were actually dangerous s*x bracelets, with each color referring to a particular s*xual act (and having one’s bracelet broken required the wearer to perform that act). Of course, critics of all stripes can suspect that the toys distract kids from their responsibilities to focus on their studies.

All of this exaggerates the significance of toy fads. Play is undeniably important to childhood development, but particular toys rarely have dramatic effects. Most parents have probably given a small child a nicely wrapped present, only to have the child ignore the gift in favor of playing with the ribbon. Adults imagine that war toys or s*xist toys or racist toys or meat toys (which trouble vegetarians) or occult toys (which concern evangelicals) will produce adults with bad values, but it’s hard to find much evidence to support those claims. No doubt some women who are feminists owned a Barbie as a kid.

Toy fads are important because they represent something novel, different. An important part of childhood is gradually separating yourself from your family and becoming your own person. We can see this when middle-school children announce a taste for music that diverges from what their parents enjoy; it’s a way of declaring, “I’m my own person.”

We can imagine slightly younger kids comparing fidget spinners – yours is an interesting color or really sparkles when it spins, while mine spins for a really long time. Fidget spinners are all the more fun to the degree they’re subterranean, with most adults clueless.

They’re getting a lot of attention today, but like all fads their novelty will inevitably fade: They’ll soon be stuffed in the corners of dresser drawers, waiting to provide little jolts of nostalgia when they’re rediscovered a few years down the road.

12/01/2022

12/01/2022