Title: Children’s Products Through The Lens of Satirical Design
Product Name: Jabberwocky
Topic/Problem description:
My thesis explores the use of satire to critique children’s products with the end goal of influencing parents’ and designers’ behaviors.
Satirists can permeate meaning through many mediums. George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Amy Sedaris, Dr. Seuss through words, Anna Russell, Bruise Springsteen in song, Williams Hogarth, Banksy with pigment, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Sarah Silverman on screen. Each of them and their works demonstrate the plasticity of satire.
Satirical Design is an adolescent field within Critical Design seeking to change and disrupt the conventional, evolving out of the philosophy and historical influence of the names above. Commercially successful products are typically the end goal of Design; however, the use of visual satire instead critiques design aesthetics, social practices, and cultural habits by targeting the designers’ and users’ principles. Successful satire produces more questions than answers.
Children’s products historically reflect the world’s more prominent issues and, in this case, the endemic plights of design. My initial research reveals that parents and designers unknowingly perpetuate issues of gender, suitability, homogeneity, and Western supremacy with the objects they give children.
Solution:
The project presented is a small-scale children’s product line, each focused on one of the unique problem areas from in my research:
Sustainability-Dino is a one-time purchase philanthropic toy. A parent buys the product at the store, goes home, and recycles the toy. Dino is then shipped with the rest of America’s recycled waste to developing nations across the world for a child in need.
Play-The Beit app teaches children common Excel commands and digitizes adults’ analog data. Tiles are produced with components from various geometric shapes representing information g uploaded by adult users. Once the child copy, cuts, and pastes each tile into place, the data is re-formatted and sent back to the adult.
Gender- The “not for” series allows children to know instantly what products they should be playing with and which to avoid. Each object is defined explicitly with color-coded semantic cues that allow parents and children to distinguish the product from one another.
Homogeneity-A home’s aesthetics is tricky to maintain when a child comes along. The stationary horse is specifically designed to fit contemporary homes. It’s geometric lines and glossy finish serve as an elegant statement in any room. To ensure children stay off the piece, the stationary horse has 5 layers of paint underneath the top finish. After even a few uses, the layers of paint rub away, revealing a gaudy colorful pattern.
Waste- 6,375 chairs is a hyper-ergonomic approach to child development. Each month roughly 30 chairs are shipped to a user’s house-one for each day. Every chair is created to exact seating recommendations evolving from as early as your child can sit to the day they turn 18. All 6,375 chairs are made from the same sheet of plastic bent into the correct dimensions at our factory.
