Introduction
Designer toys are art toys and collectibles that are independently created by artists and designers. They are produced in limited edition as few as 1 to 2000 pieces. It is a blend of industrial design, graphics and illustration design. The creation of designer art toys is a shift from an underground subculture to a mainstream design genre. (Vartanian 2008) Because designer toys is a relatively new design genre, its definition and position in the design territories is still unclear. It is alternative yet, interesting and unique.
The uniqueness of designer toys is its capability of making impossible possible in the real design world, as toy is a scaling down of a much larger real, surreal or unreal thing. (Full vinyl) Designer toy is valuable for the reason that it is a representation of an idea that could not exist or perform in the reality. For example, because there are the marketing and financial concern in every design project, there are so many constrains that it is impossible to just design and produce a piece of furniture, or an automotive that you dream about. The production of one’s ideal product is never easily going to become true. But you can always make it happen when it is a toy. This is what makes it powerful: In the designer toys world, a hypothetical concept becomes a tangible symbol can be holding on hands. (Vartanian 2008)
Although everything could become possible in the designer toys practice, they are not as simple as just putting ideas of a childhood dream or an unrealistic concept into a toy. There are very defined criteria that an object has to offer to be a so called a ‘designer toy’ or ‘Urban Vinyl figure’. There are also so many unfold area and untold stories behind these artifacts. While designer toys are original, aesthetically appeal and colourful, the design processes sit within several design approaches and methodologies.
In this literature research paper, it analyses and critiques how designer toys projects and Urban Vinyl culture engage with and informed by three design methodological frameworks including experience design approach, aided by slow design and good design frameworks.
It reviews three existing cases of designer toys projects greatly performed by three Urban Vinyl toy designers, ‘The Gardener’ by Michael Lau, ‘Chum’ by Brian Donnelly, and ‘YOD’ by James Jarvis, and based on two literatures of designer toys and Urban Vinyl, Woodrow Phoenix’s ‘Plastic Culture’ (2006) and ‘Full Vinyl’ (2008) by Ivan Vartanian.
The point of view is also inspired by texts corresponding to experience, slow and good design, ‘Experience of Modernity’ by Marshall Berman and ‘ Do Good Design’ by David Berman.
Methodological Frameworks
Designer toys projects often involve experience design methodology with an emphasis on aesthetic. In the Urban Vinyl culture, vinyl toy designers attempt to draw from many sources of cultural inspiration and create relevant integrations between concepts, methods and theories. The mission of experience design is to persuade, stimulate, inform, entertain, and influencing meaning and modifying human behavior. (Jones 2008) These are the functionalities of designer toys with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions.
Aesthetic experience design is driven by consideration of the moments of engagement. ‘Whatever aesthetic experience might be, it certainly involves emotion’. ( Shusterman 2009 ) When a designer toy is being used, the engagement between the designer, the user and the toy identifies the desired outcome of the product. ‘They are events in the brain, a cognitive interpretation of one’s feelings. Emotional experiences with more extended trajectories are at best treated as strings of emotional atoms.’ ( Shusterman 2009 ) The practice of designer toys is to achieve whatever the design intention is through delivering this sensation modern experience.
In aid of delivering experience, the design process of vinyl toys employs the practical method of slow design and good design philosophical thinking.
Slow design is a design thinking of longer design processes with more time on designing detail and fine-tuning. Its process involves local or regional materials, technologies and crafts. This framework provides a platform for further debate while offering a pluralistic, secular canvas for designers to encourage individual and socio-cultural change towards slowing metabolisms for a more sustainable future. (Fuad-Luke 2005)
Slow design manifests itself in existing objects and spaces, in products and buildings, in real and virtual environments, and in socio-cultural experiences.(Fuad-Luke 2005) And local culture is an important source of inspiration in slow design framework. It is essential that the design outcome related heavily to the cultural relations. ‘Slow Design contribute towards understanding the potential benefits towards individual, socio-cultural and environmental well-being.’ (Fuad-Luke 2005)
“Good design” is its connotation of moral authority.( Hall 2009 ) It’s hard to judge if a design is good or bad. Some important icons of product-design history are similarly useless: Raymond Loewy’s streamlined pencil sharpener which never went into production, Philippe Starck’s famously dysfunctional Juicy Salif lemon squeezer. One could argue that this useless object is not design. But the above examples were created by designers and belong to an ongoing conversation about design. This is the idea that ‘good design’ can serve as a medium for discussion about the cultural and ethical implications of technology. (Hall 2009) Many objects are designed not to be useful but to make an argument that every object is an argument of some sort, and its strength or weakness as an argument is a good guide to its value. (Hall 2009) Designer toys might not be practical; the true function of them is not only to be played with, but also to deliver a concept, an argument or an experience.
Case Studies and Reviews in Design Approaches
Chum by BRIAN DONNELLY in EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Aesthetic experience is the most fundamental design deliverable that designer toys offer. The project “Chum”, originally a 7-foot-tall sculpture became a 12-inch toy figure, is a great piece of artifact that sits within the experience design methodology with an emphasis on aesthetic. This toy is the reworking of the Michelin Man by Brian Donnelly, whose street name KAWS.
KAWS is an artist and designer of limited edition toys and clothing based in New York. KAWS began his work as a graffiti street artist in the early 1990s, and since then he has built an identity that had its genesis in adding visual-art like painting, subverting imagery to deface advertisements on billboards, phone booth and bus shelters.
He later converts familiar visuals into affronting works of art. He then gained success in the gallery world by his work of paintings. His paintings feature his usual cross-section of familiar cultural icons painted with precise execution. The resulting pieces feature the trademark graphic quality inherent in his work. His work also crossed-over with popular visual icon, for example, he reworked the Simpsons and Mickey mouse, with his iconic style into the “Kimpsons” and “Mickey Mouse Companion”.
And when KAWS moved onto customizing toys figures, his project ‘Chum’ signified KAWS’ mass influence within the contemporary designer toys world, shining a new guiding light onto the genre. Chum is the customization toy as a form of sculpture, which is backed up by KAWS’ attention to detail and his ‘vinyl is the new canvas’ philosophy. He compares his technique to that of mathematics: adding and subtracting. It focuses on adding the quality of the user experience by subtracting the complexity of the forms of his toy. His unique sculptural approach to toy resembles the Michelin Man that is encased in plastic packaging.
“To be modern is to a live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure” (Berman 1998). KAWS’ technique acts as a sieve of modern culture, filtering and re-contextualizing the images and information that he comes in contact with daily. “Modern sensibility is the expansion of experiential possibilities and destruction of moral boundaries and personal bonds, self-enlargement and self-derangement, phantoms in the street and in the soul. “(Berman 1998) The process of KAWS’ work is all encompassing, embracing popular culture and the visual landscape of the familiar. His work can be thought of as an overarching brand; however it is also immediate and organic. This energetic immediacy can be felt in the project Chum.
‘When I grew up, I never thought I could enter a gallery,’ KAWS stated in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, ‘I looked at them as these pretentious places that did not welcome me.’ KAWS gallery achievement follows the artist’s commercial success with both his art toys, paintings and sculptures that re-contextualize familiar pop culture. “To understand the aesthetic attitude in terms of a readiness for imagination is, to be sure, to move from one obscure notion to another.” (Cooper 2009) KAWS has done that as he also collaborated on design projects with popular brand like Commes Des Garcons, Marc Jacobs, and A Bathing Ape. Most recently he has worked with American rapper Kanye West to create the cover art for Kanye’s current album. This reworking of popular culture has grown KAWS into a multi-faceted, multi-pronged endeavor that has ventured into the realm of contemporary art. KAWS situates himself at the crossroads of media and art as a vanguard in the new frontier of the 21st century artistic discourse.
YOD by James Jarvis in SLOW DESIGN
YOD is an Urban Vinyl high concept art toy project done by James Jarvis from a slow design approach, which is another important methodology to Urban Vinyl toy design.
Jarvis was an illustrator before he made his first designer toy. He has a culmination of ten years experience in the design and production of independent toy figures. His projects set the benchmark for similar products in future.
YOD is a toy character with a potato head like creature. Jarvis developed this character from original hand drawings. This project is designed to deliver an iconic experience to user, the initial design concept is about ‘a very pure, just a walking potato head’. As slow design is designing to slow human, economic and resource use metabolisms (Fuad-Luke 2005), project YOD has performed in the same way. It is a slow design process from illustrating the character to manufacturing from 2D drawing to 3D sculptural vinyl toy. It is the manifest in slow design that encourages a reduction in human, economic, industrial and urban resource flow metabolisms (Fuad-Luke 2005) Jarvis used the similar design thinking designed space to think, react and dream within YOD.
Besides, YOD is a toy designed for collection. It has the notion of long time for collecting. It is a design encouraging a long view. And this project also repositioned toy design in terms of the focus of design on individual, socio-cultural and environmental well-being. (Fuad-Luke 2005) YOD is designed for the people who play this toy, which means collecting but not selling. With the ‘People first, commercialization second’ attitude, there is less about marketing and commercial consideration.
Jarvis has also created different version of the same toy which may be later hand painted by different artists. This fulfils the process of slow design is comprehensive, inclusive and reflective considered. (Fuad-Luke 2005) It aimed to look to sources outside of those used for conventional soft vinyl figure design and It permits evolution and development of the design outcomes.
In short, YOD metaphors further growth and evolution of the species. It contrasts the reality by its pureness. It is so simple that it is almost not possible to find it in the real world. This slow method and approach to create YOD was truly unorthodox. This unique creative path has resulted in a very special product that breaks all boundaries of toy production.
Gardeners by MICHAEL LAU in GOOD DESIGN
Michael Lau is the most significant designer in the world of designer toys. His work was instrumental in defining a new category of collectible figures as he is the first designer came up with the idea of making original highly detailed, vinyl-made grown-up toys. The first toy project he did, which is also the first ever Urban Vinyl designer toy project in the world of toy design history, named the project “Gardeners”. In regards to good design is not only about creating a good or a bad design product but also creating an argument (hall 2009), the Gardeners is all about good design.
Lau worked as a retoucher in an oil painting factory after graduation from school. And then as a window display designer for a department store and later became a ‘visualizer’ at an advertising agency. He has always been the person who converts a concept into a sketch or a storyboard. Until then he was working on a comic ‘Strip’ which he illustrates a universe around a group of characters. In 1998, he decided to develop his illustrations into toy figures – the Gardeners, which made Lau’s name.
Gardener is a set of high-quality vinyl 12 inch-tall figures based on street-fashionable youth, which Lau worked for nine months to build them. These figures originally were made of hard ABS plastic that is solidified in an expensive mould, making them too expensive to custom-fabricate anything larger than heads, hands or feet. Another way to produce plastic toys is the casting vinyl method: vinyl plastic is injected into a cheaper mould and spun, producing a hollow object, which is then hand painted. Although vinyl toys cannot exhibit the fine detail of ABS plastic, they are far cheaper and easier to produce. Because the mould is less expensive, designer can reconfigure the entire shape; they then have the advantage of not being constrained by the 12-inch anatomical form. Looking to transform the designer-toy movement into something commercially viable, Lau landed on vinyl.
Initially there are 101 ‘Garderners’ in the collection, and Lau creates unique personality for each of the characters. There are street kids, basketball players, graffiti artists, rappers, DJs, skateboarders, surfers, wakeboarders and snowboarders handmade by moulding original head, bodies, hands and feet out of vinyl. The figures come along with trendy fashion styles for examples baggy shorts, camouflage jackets, street sweatshirts and of-the-moment sneakers, adorned with chains, earrings and tattoos, and hair in dreadlocks or pressed beneath bright-colored caps. These clothes and accessories are reflective of many of the top brands in the fields of street, graffiti and hip-hop music culture. For instance, the skateboarders wear sneakers by Nike, DC and clothes from Alphanumeric. The snowboarders ride Burton snowboards. The Gardeners all wear very popular brand products ranging from Asian Japanese styles to American street fashion like Bathing Ape, Maharishi, Saru and Zero Nine. These are the contemporary street culture, hip-hop culture and skateboard style in Lau’s vision.
‘It‘s like the modern uniform,’ Lau said to an interview, ‘Teenagers or kidult in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Britain and the States all look the same.’ Lau’s Gardener being described as sharply observed, exuberantly imaginative (Lubow 2004) in the article ‘Cult Figures’, ‘This is all the way people wanted to look.’
In addition to creating a universe around his figures Michael is adamant about what they represent. There is an understanding of the culture and detail in every toy he created. Michael Lau wrote about his unique approach to the figures comes from an idea of, ‘what is the lifestyle of nowadays? You can find it at the Gardener. What is the current trend of street culture? You can find it in Gardener.’ The Gardeners are the depicted kids who do the coolest things amount the youth – wear like a dude, dripping with tattoos, hanging around the street, skateboarding and surfing. And they are gangs of friends who do street art graffiti, fashion and music. They just want to be cool; they do anything but hurting people and ruining lives. That is their attitude, nothing negative. ‘No booze, No smoke, No drugs, No crimes. That’s Gardeners.‘ That’s Lau explanation.
‘The figures are free to develop relationships, get married, go to work, move out of town and allow new members to be introduced.’ That is the freedom that they should have. ‘We, a group of young people, are living nowadays. We are living in our own world, with our own culture. We are the real people and we smile crazily. And we have 101 different stories.’ They are a group of people with their own culture; they ignore other people and enjoy what they are doing. This is the argument and the core concept of this one of the most important designer toys project in the world.
These days the demand for vinyl has made it harder for quality to match quantity. But Michael Lau remains independent by limiting his production and continuing his hands-on approach to every step of the production of his brand. He not only creates his own concept art, but actually sculpts and paints his figures for production. Overseeing his Hong Kong-based team on every aspect, from packaging to sales, Michael Lau and his HYPERLINK “http://kix-files.com/2009/09/the-10th-anniversary-of-gardener-by-michael-lau-usa-exhibition/www.crazysmiles.com” crazysmiles company have also become one of the most relevant sources of information about the toy scene around the world. ‘We want to build up a culture of how to play with toys, not how to buy and sell’. Designers have enormous power to influence how we see our world, how we live our lives (Berman 2009), Michael Lau has shown a clear example.
‘We need to be constantly aware of what we do, for whom we work and how our work affects others. We cannot ignore the reality that design is a business and has to live by the rules of business.’( Berman 2009 ) That is what Lau’s attitude towards design, ”In a very boring world, something happens and people hook on it, and Michael Lau created it,” he says, speaking of himself in the third person. ”My aim is to challenge myself and not think of how famous I can be.”
