Whilst at the 2012 Toy Fair in London last week, I tried my best to look out for interesting toy companies, amongst all the usual ones that you might expect. One such company was WOW Toys.
It was probably the uber-bright primary-coloured plastic toys which initially caught my eye, but as I talked to the sales reps I learnt about their real USP: no batteries.
I have to admit, at first I couldn't see how this was particular special - surely most pre-school toys are like this. But the creative team behind WOW Toys clearly saw this design decision as a challenge rather than an obstacle, and so have put their energies into coming up with ever more ingenious ways to add play features that a purely mechanical.
Quite a few of their vehicle toys contain a 'friction motor', which uses a kind of flywheel to store energy, so that if you just push it a little way, it'll continue to travel further under its own steam in a seem lying physics-defying way. I remember having a few of these kind of toy cars as a child - they're fun and intriguing. (Even after reading a description of how these motors work on Wikipedia, I still don't fully understand it. Would love to see a diagram.)
Some of the toys also contain two moving parts which are internally geared together - so that for example if you turn one knob on the fire engine, the extended ladder rotates. The combine harvester toy has a kind of internal conveyor belt, geared with the wheels, so that if you drop a hay bale in the top, it'll pop out the back. Some of the toys also manage to make sounds (such as an engine noise) as they're played with - all still without batteries.
These 'magic features' might not sound that impressive described like this (or indeed, even with pictures on their website), but in the flesh they were pretty cool - easily the kind of thing that would surprise and delight a small child.
The themes covered by the toys are mainly fairly standard, such as emergency services, construction vehicles, farm and town, but there are a few more imaginative models, such as a campervan, an arctic snowmobile and a dragon-hauled boulder-transport cart.
The company is based in London (though the toys are manufactured in China), and they're so confident of the durability that all of the toys come with a 10 year guarantee - also unusual, as the sales rep pointed out.
One final small detail I love: all of their mini figures are doing the thumbs up.
I love the presentation and selection of images on this blog. It's a bit of a shame that the text is a little impersonal (mainly from Wikipedia), but all in all an inspiring site.
I visited the 2012 Toy Fair in London last week. As I mentioned whilst discussing BRIO pull-alongs, one of the strong themes I noticed was the number of wooden toys for sale.
Within this category, some of the most common product types were toy market stalls and kitchen units, often sold alongside toy fruit and veg. These allow young children to 'play shop', or to role play cooking dinner (or doing the laundry) - a fairly traditional and wholesome activity.
One innovation I hadn't seen before was 'sliceable' food (e.g. carrots), which could be chopped up with a wooden knife, and then stuck back together again, through the magic of simple velcro. This is a neat play feature, and also helps teach cutlery skills.
However, later on in the day, I came across another company selling wooden play furniture who were a bit different.
Millhouse is a 30-year old British company, who for starters are unusual by actually manufacturing their products themselves, in Lincolnshire (rather than China or Thailand).
Their version of the toy kitchen unit cleverly doubles up as a market stall via a blackboard on the back of the unit. They also promote it as a 'healthy eating kitchen' and supply a kit with it containing plant pots, compost pellets and seeds - everything a child needs to get started with growing things for themselves.
The stock marketing photos for the product are propped, as the sales rep was keen to point out to me, with real fruit and veg rather than toys.
The message here is simple - they think children could be learning about and engaging with real food rather than toys.
This idea struck a chord with me. Whilst working at the Science Museum, one thing the exhibition design teams were often keen to emphasise was the importance of showing real phenomena, rather than simulations. You can see this in the distinction between the Launchpad gallery (hands-on science exhibits) and the old, long closed down and much internally despised, Food For Thought gallery, which contained mock-ups (complete with toy food) of a supermarket checkout and a fast food restaurant.
However, I don't know how far this thought should go. When should a toy not be a toy? Would it be better to introduce children to real carpentry tools rather than toy ones? Or a real stethoscope instead of a toy one? I don't really know the answer to these kind of questions, but the Millhouse products did make me stop and consider the different values of toys, playing, and learning - something I wasn't really expecting at a toy fair.
One of the interesting side-effects of going to the 2012 Toy Fair was seeing some connections, similarities, and trends across the different companies represented there.
There was a huge number of wooden toys, for instance. I wrote some thoughts on why I think this might be a few weeks ago – in short, a combination of nostalgia and eco-simplicity.
The thing that struck me at the toy fair though was just how similar a lot of these wooden toys are. I counted at least five stalls that had their own variation of a wooden 'vegetable market stall', for instance (upping the nostalgia value even more). The other ubiquitous product was the wooden train set.
There's a whole Wikipedia article about wooden toy trains, which goes into a lot of the history behind the tradition. In my head, wooden toy trains are inextricably linked with BRIO, the Swedish company whose trains and track I had a huge amount of as a child.
In a similar way to which there are now lots of Lego-compatible bricks (see Lego & trademarks), there has long been lots of BRIO-compatible trains and track sold by other companies (they're labelled as simply "compatible with other leading wooden rail systems").
Unlike Lego though, quite a few of the competitor companies' products looked at least as good as BRIO's, and actually some of BRIO's newest train sets looked a bit naff, with plastic-y hills and tunnels.
The BRIO product range that really did stand out though was their pull-along toys. This is another hugely popular product idea, but BRIO's version showed a level of design and quality that was far above everything else.
Pictures don't really do these toys justice, because what was magical about them was they way they moved as they're pulled. Each toy has a simple but ingenious purely mechanic movement which beautifully brings alive the creature that the toy depicts.
The giraffe, for instance, uses some cams on the feet to make it gently 'trot' and nod its head as it's rolled forward. I've watched plenty of giraffes walk around at Chester Zoo, and so I can say from experience that the designers have nailed the movement perfectly.
The ant, on the other hand, carries an egg on its back, as ants are want to do when building their colony. The magical thing here is that the egg is gently rotated about itself as the ant 'walks' forward. Again, a perfect depiction.
The bumble bee makes a gentle (non-annoying) buzzing sound as it's pulled, and rotates its wings at such speed that it looks like they're vibrating furiously. The duck 'flaps' its wings and quacks.
Possibly my favourite is the seal, which doesn't even have wheels, and instead does a perfect impression of doing the sort of paddle-assisted belly flop that seals do on ice.
You might wonder how I could be just this excited at such simple a toy (designed for 12-36 month old babies), but honestly, this level of design simplicity and perfection deserves to be celebrated.
I visited the annual toy industry Toy Fair in London yesterday. It's a huge trade show in Earl's Court Olympia where toy designers, manufacturers and distributors erect display stands and pitch their products to retailers.
It was the first time I've been, and all in all quite an exhausting experience.
Whilst all the big names you'd expect were there – Hasbro, Lego, Playmobil, Hornby, etc – often with huge stands and teams of sales staff, it was often the small one-man-band type stands that were most intriguing.
Of these, Wedgits was one that caught my eye. The product consists of bright, primary coloured plastic pieces that fit and lock together. Unlike Lego and other construction toys though, the locking mechanism isn't based on the friction you get from a tight fit. Instead it's a little more mathematical, and derives just from the geometry of the pieces and the way they wedge together.
To be honest, even having seen it being demonstrated a few times, I still don't quite fully understand how it works, but the structures I saw being built and unbuilt were quite incredible.
The basis of the design is a simple Octahedron shape (imagine two square-based pyramids stuck together. Other larger bricks are based around a square with a rhombus-style cross-section, and share the same angles and widths, with the result that they stack together in interesting ways.
The product comes in two different scales, standard and 'mini', which is 40% smaller and is designed for slightly older children (5-12 instead of 2-10). I suspect the mini size is probably a little more fun, especially as you get more pieces for the same price.
There's lots more to say about the Toy Fair, but for me Wedgits represents one of the most fun and inspiring aspects of it: passionate people selling innovative products they've invented.
A little over two years ago I ditched my trusty Nokia phone and got an iPhone. No regrets there, but iPhone did come with a hefty 24 month contract with Vodafone costing in theory £30 a month (in practice closer to £40 due to some extra charges that I never understood).
With this contract having expired, I've since switched to a simple pay-as-you-go SIM. The cost, so far, has been less than 50p a week.
That's more than a 95% saving.
I didn't think it'd be quite that cheap, but then I don't make very many mobile phone calls (and when I do they're typically short), and whilst I'm using the data connection on the phone quite a lot, that's mostly when connected to a Wi-Fi network.
Also, most of my text messages now get routed through Apple's iMessage servers rather than via SMS.
It all goes to show just how much you end up 'paying' for the phone when getting it cheap/free on a contract. The psychological appeal of not having to pay a large amount up-front has a very real long-term cost.
As a side-effect of moving to PAYG, I'm now holding off from 'upgrading' my phone until I really need to - and the £500 cost of doing so is being more fairly weighed against the other things I could spend that money on.
Object piracy is just around the corner, and significant chunks of the commercial world are likely to unite against civil liberties to try and preserve monopolies.
China has been doing object piracy on an industrial scale for years. I guess what's really around the corner is the ability for this to also take place at a consumer level.
Although I suspect we're a long way off seeing a 3D printer produce a decent quality Lego brick.
I've always strongly held the belief that existing copyright and trademark laws should be relaxed to allow culture, ideas and designs to spread more freely. I also think that generally 'open standards' are a good idea, making it easier to compete on content, not on format.
Given this, you'd think that logically I'd be in favour of the 'system' of Lego - the dimensions of the bricks and their connectors - passing into the public domain so that anyone could make compatible parts.
In reality though, I find myself hugely conflicted over this. Whilst I have no objection to the companies like BrickArms, who make minifig accessories that Lego would never produce (e.g. AK47s), the ongoing dispute with Mega Bloks leaves me more troubled.
Mega Bloks starting making Lego-compatible bricks since 1991, and have been in dispute with Lego ever since. The latest legal wrangling is over the US-import of MegaBloks's newest Halo-themed sets.
A key argument hinges on Lego’s trademark of the cylindrical stud element used during play to fit into tubes on the bottom of the bricks, connecting them together. Montreal-based Mega Brands is claiming that the studs are functional components, and therefore not eligible for trademark protection.
Lego's patent on the tube-and-stud brick connection expired in 1988. Since then they've been trying, and mostly failing, to claim that the design is covered under the longer-lasting trademark and copyright laws.
So Mega Bloks clearly have every right to make compatible bricks - and Lego's attempts to hold onto the monopoly over the simple (but ingenious) brick design are a little morally dubious.
However my heart still tells me that Lego is just not Lego unless it has the official 'LEGO' logo stamped on top of each of the studs. And far from improving the market, the products from Mega Bloks are generally of a much lower quality, with cheap-feeling plastic and poor set design.
I guess it all comes down to following aphorism (author unknown):
There's nothing wrong with a monopoly - so long as it's a good one.
This applies, in my view, to the NHS, railways, and Lego.
I often get told about Imposter Syndrome, which is basically characterised by the belief that you have somehow fooled everyone into thinking you are clever, and soon someone is going to find out that you shouldn’t really be here and you are a fraud. I feel like this on a daily basis.
I suspect that everyone experiences this at some point. The only cure is realising that everyone else is an impostor too.
Apple announced a new iBooks Author app today, a tool for creating multimedia books for the iPad. I haven't yet had the time to properly look at it, but what I find most interesting is the integration with the iBookstore, allowing you to sell or freely distribute the books you've created.
One of the criticisms of the iPad when it was first announced was that it was primarily a 'consuming' device - for watching videos, playing games, reading books and browsing the internet. This was partly refuted through Apple's suite of creation tools - Pages, GarageBand and iMovie, which are also available as iPad apps. However there's still a big divide between the 'professional' content you can buy on iTunes, and the content that users can create themselves.
Whilst there are plenty of apps created by bedroom developers and one-person companies on the App Store, there isn't currently a similar flood of non-industry-produced digital content on iTunes.
If the new iBooks Author app allows authors and content writers to easily publish their books, then perhaps Apple will soon also do the same for GarageBand and iMovie, finally bridging the gulf between amateur and professional content.
