Ungendering Childhood

Ungendering Childhood: The Role of Reflective Design Materials in Activism Against the Gendering of Children’s Toys

Theresa Nichols

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) creativecommons.org

Ungendering Childhood: The Role of Reflective Design Materials in Activism Against the Gendering of Children’s Toys

by Theresa Nichols Supervisor: Wendy Gunn

MSc in IT Product Design University of Southern Denmark June, 2014

Abstract This thesis explores the use of reflective design materials as activism regarding the ungendering of children’s toys. Activists have been campaigning against the gendering of children’s toys due to concerns about the negative impact gendered toys may have on children. After reviewing the current situation, I collaborated with stakeholders to develop a series of reflective design materials, which were sequenced to form a facilitated co-design workshop. From the results of research through design and the testing of the materials, this thesis offers suggestions for using reflective design materials as activism and opens up lines of inquiry concerning the design of gender-neutral toys. I propose a distinction between genderless, androgynous and gender-ambiguous as different gender-neutral design strategies.

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Acknowledgments I am very grateful for all of the people who have helped me throughout my research and made this thesis possible.

I would like to thank:

My supervisor Wendy Gunn for all of her guidance, encouragement and feedback throughout, and for providing me with the amazing opportunity to work with one of her Interaction Design classes.

Henry Larsen for reviewing my draft and for all the conversations and advice along the way.

My classmates and friends Patricia, Ina, Gustavo and Daniel for our group meetings, which helped guide my research.

My friend and roommate Nantia for supporting and motivating me, and for emphasizing the importance of an occasional break.

My good friend Mary for lending a helping hand.

The Let Toys Be Toys organization for collaborating with me and allowing me to contribute towards one of their projects.

The Interaction Design class that I collaborated with (Sara, Tudor, Nelle, Sanne, Mathias, Silver and their assistant teacher Wafa) for their invaluable input and assistance.

Henrike, Stefan, Thomas, Vicki, Shelly, Gitte, James and his son for participating in my design workshops.

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Robb Mitchell for remembering me when coming across relevant news articles and passing on the links.

And, Vicki Sørensen for her frequent reassurance.

Table of Contents 1. Introduction...................................................................................................................................................................5 1.1 1.1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

Personal Motivation.................................................................................................................................................7 Public Narrative..........................................................................................................................................................7 Research Question.................................................................................................................................................. 9 Stakeholders.............................................................................................................................................................. 9 Methods...................................................................................................................................................................... 9 Framework for Analysis........................................................................................................................................ 10 Contribution............................................................................................................................................................ 10

2. Background and Related Work.........................................................................................................................11 2.1 2.2

Children, Gender and Toys...................................................................................................................................13 Actions, Activism and Reactions.........................................................................................................................14

3. Collaborative Process, Design Materials and Workshop Design....................................................17 3.1 3.1.1 3.1.2 3.1.3 3.1.4 3.2 3.2.1 3.2.2 3.2.3 3.2.4 3.3

Collaboration with Let Toys Be Toys................................................................................................................. 18 Project for Schools and My Role......................................................................................................................... 18 National ‘Design and Technology’ Curriculum as a Framework................................................................... 19 Designing a Printable Lesson Toolkit for Schools.............................................................................................21 The ‘Key Stage 3’ Let Toys Be Toys Lesson Toolkit.......................................................................................... 22 Collaboration with Interaction Design Students........................................................................................... 24 Design of a Tangible Persona Toolkit.................................................................................................................. 24 Design of a Self-reflective Game......................................................................................................................... 25 Design of a Reflective Gender-Mapping Tool................................................................................................... 27 Forming a Workshop.............................................................................................................................................. 29 Reflection on Stakeholder-Informed Design Decisions............................................................................... 30

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4. Analysis, Results and Discussion................................................................................................... 31 4.1 4.2 4.2.1 4.2.2 4.2.3 4.2.4 4.2.5 4.2.6 4.2.7 4.3

Reflection Instigated by the Design Process.................................................................................................. 32 Using the Reflective Design Materials.............................................................................................................. 32 Playing Mikado as a Self-Reflective Game........................................................................................................ 34 Determining the Personas’ Genders................................................................................................................... 34 Comparison Between the Tangible and Paper Toolkits.................................................................................. 36 Creating a Scenario of Play................................................................................................................................... 37 Designing Toys for Both Boys and Girls............................................................................................................. 38 Evaluating the Relationship Between Gender and Toy Design.....................................................................40 The Design Materials as Activism........................................................................................................................ 42 Classifying Types of Gender-Neutral Toy Design..........................................................................................44

5. Conclusions........................................................................................................................................45 5.1 5.2

Towards a Framework for Gender-Neutral Toy Design...............................................................................46 Suggestions for Using Reflective Design Materials as Activism.................................................................46

References................................................................................................................................................... 47

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1. Introduction Though it has not always been the case, children’s toys are currently highly gendered.

Many toy retailers organize their stores by gender, and since they do not have a section for gender-neutral toys, they are therefore reluctant to sell them. Some retailers are concerned that toys that do not fit into the current gendered categories will not sell, claiming that they are responding to customer demands (Rosenbaum, 2010). Though this may be good for business, research has suggested that it may be detrimental to children’s development (Blakemore and Centers, 2005), and there has been a surge of activism against the gendering of children’s toys in recent years. Through campaigns and petitions, activists have succeeded in persuading some companies to change their practices. As activists are making progress, the gender division between toy aisles is beginning to blur in more toyshops, which may also grant toy designers more freedom to design less gender-stereotypical toys. Though the concept of gender-neutral toys is not new, there are opportunities to research the nature of gender-neutral toys and how to design them, especially how to do so without entirely excluding themes that are strongly associated with a particular gender.

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Many parents have expressed their approval of developments such as the elimination of gendered sections and labeling from toyshops. However, these changes to the way toys are being marketed and organized in shops have been met with criticism and ambivalence as well. Those affected by the issue should be encouraged to reflect on its potential impact and take a stance, and as a designer, I have an interest in exploring design activism as means of doing so. Design activism can be defined as using design to make a call for social change (Thorpe, n.d.). To make such a call, I attempt to use design materials—which are objects used for communication, engagement, exploration and thinking during a design process (Eriksen, 2008)—as tools to instigate reflection on gender stereotypes in relation to toy design.

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1.1

Personal Motivation

The conflict surrounding the gender division of children’s toys interests me both as a designer and as an activist. This issue has been an important personal matter to me since I was a child myself, and I believe this is a significant topic of research, since the increasingly extreme gender dichotomy of children’s products and their marketing has become a topic of debate and has an impact on people’s lives from childhood to adulthood. I have been following media coverage on the topic for several years and can relate to the struggles that children and their parents are going through regarding gender stereotyping, since I had experienced some of these struggles first hand while growing up and regularly witnessed others struggle with these issues while working in establishments that children and their families frequented. Through these observations, as well as through the stories I’ve encountered online, I have vicariously relived negative experiences from my childhood.

1.1.1 Public Narrative1

Upon watching the viral video “Riley on Marketing,” which features a then four-year-old girl in a toy store expressing her frustration over how girls “have to buy princesses” and “pink stuff” (ABC News, 2011), I recalled being equally frustrated

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as a child in the 1990s when McDonald’s sold Barbie and Hot Wheels themed toys in parallel. Though I preferred the Hot Wheels toys, I was consistently given Barbie toys with my Happy Meals without being offered a choice, and I faced difficulties when requesting the Hot Wheels toys— or as they were referred to, the “boy’s toys”—instead. I am now aware that this is a commonly shared experience, which both children and parents have found to be objectionable (Ayres-Brown, 2014; Gumbinner, 2011). Though, I am also aware from personal experience that parents have drastically opposing views when it comes to the enforcement of gender stereotypes. While working at another fast food restaurant that includes randomly selected, non-gender specific toys with its kids’ meals, I was often confronted by parents who were upset that the toys they were given were not gender appropriate enough.

I have never grown out of my love of toys and play and have seriously considered working in the toy industry, though due to my views on the ongoing gender stereotyping of toys, if I did so, I would likely face personal moral dilemmas on a regular basis. This leads me to ask: What can we, as designers, do to begin breaking down the division between “boy’s toys” and “girl’s toys?”

A public narrative is a story told to inspire action. It tells the “story of self,” “the story of us,” and “the story of now” within a plot containing a challenge, a choice, and an outcome (Ganz, 2008).

Ungendering Childhood—Introduction

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Ungendering Childhood—Introduction

1.2

Activists Toy Consumers who are calling for change

Parents & Children toy Consumers

Research Question

To explore the role design materials might play in the activism against the gendering of toys in terms of design activism, the main research question addressed in this thesis is: How do design materials instigate reflection on gender issues and toy design, and how might this contribute towards the goal of designing less gender-stereotypical toys?

1.3 Stakeholders

Toy Designers employeed by toy companies

Toy Industry Reluctant to change their design & marketing strategies

Figure 1 A visualization showing designers, parents and children in a gray area between activists and the toy industry. Toy designers work for toy companies, and parents and children are consumers of their products. Some activists are also consumers (parents and children). In this research, I bring parents, children and designers together.

Stakeholders affected by these issues include: children, parents, designers, toy companies/manufacturers, toy retailers, and gender equality and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) activists. Though activists are already strongly motivated to advocate for change regarding gender stereotypes in toy design and marketing, and toy-related businesses have a clear motive to continue conducting themselves as they do currently for as long as it’s profitable; children, parents, and designers fall into somewhat of a gray area, likely to be more easily persuaded in either direction. As consumers and employees, they also hold a lot of potential power in terms of activism (see figure 1). For these reasons, children, parents, and designers are the primary target audience for the design materials developed during this thesis.

1.4 Methods I have used a combination of research and design methods in order to address the main research questions proposed in this thesis. I collaborated with two groupings of stakeholders, taking a research through design approach, which utilizes the design process as a method of inquiry with “the intended goal of societal change” (Zimmerman, Stolterman and Forlizzi, 2010). Documenting through a combination of field notes, video, and audio recording, I began designing reflective lesson

Ungendering Childhood—Introduction

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materials for school children in cooperation with a parentled activist organization called Let Toys Be Toys, following the constraints of a design brief that was co-constructed by the group. With the help of a group of interactive design engineering students, I continued to further develop materials for multiple stakeholders, including designers, by creating a set of reflective design materials and establishing a series of design workshops. I conducted the first workshop as passive observer, with design students as participants, and then conducted a second workshop, which was a multi-stakeholder co-design workshop, employing participatory observation.

The co-construction of a design brief, collaborative design process, and multi-stakeholder co-design workshop are linked thematically through the concept of bringing different stakeholder voices together, which is often done in activism.

1.5

Framework for Analysis

The findings of this thesis have been drawn through a process of analysis based on Valkenburg and Dorst’s (1998) method of naming, framing, moving and reflecting. I looked for instances of participant and stakeholder reflection, considered what instigated these reflections, and examined the outcomes. I searched for evidence suggesting the strengths and weaknesses of the design materials and workshop facilitation in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the materials’ use as activist tools to engage participants and initiate reflection. Based on this evaluation, I assessed how the materials might be improved upon, offering suggestions for designing and using reflective

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Ungendering Childhood—Introduction

design materials for the purpose of activism. I also compared the different design approaches taken by participants when faced with the problem of designing a toy for both a boy and a girl and attempted to form an understanding of how stakeholders who worked with the materials perceive the relationship between gender and toy design. Informed by this, I have designated terms to describe different ways a toy or product could be perceived as gender-neutral and use these terms to propose a method for classifying different genderneutral design strategies.

1.6 Contribution This thesis makes a contribution to the field of design by opening up lines of inquiry concerning design practice and what changes should be considered in order to inspire the design of less stereotypically gendered toys. I highlight the strategic role that design materials can play as a means of activism and potential catalyst for the change of design practices. In the process of research through design, I have contributed to the Let Toys Be Toys campaign by providing the organization with a lesson toolkit, which may be distributed online and used by schoolteachers, and this thesis itself could be seen as a piece of academic activism (Fernández, 2013). In addition, I contribute to the existing pool of research regarding the perception of gender in relation to toys and play—which is dominated by the fields of psychology, sociology, market research and child development—from a design perspective.

2. Background and Related Work

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Ungendering Childhood—Background and Related Work

2.1

Children, Gender and the Toys

The prevalence of gender-based toy design and marketing has cyclically increased and decreased over the passed century, with the trend of toys being explicitly gendered most recently dissipating in the early 1970s, and then dramatically re-emerging in the 1990s, still on the incline in recent years (Sweet, 2012). Gender-specific toy marketing strategies are based on cultural gender stereotypes (Lamb et al, 2009); toys marketed towards boys tend to be related to violence, competition and danger, while toys targeted towards girls tend to have beauty, household skills and nurturing as common themes (Johnson and Young, 2002). Different toys are produced to target children based on gender because this is profitable, since using gender-based marketing to target children is effective (Johnson an Young, 2002) and it enables toy makers to sell more versions of the same toy (Sweet, 2012). Gendered marketing greatly influences children’s selfperception, teaching them what it means to be a girl/boy, what girls/boys should be interested in, and what character traits they should have (Lamb et al, 2009). This leads to children adopting strict gender norms, and when a child deviates from these norms, for example if a boy chooses to play with a girls’ toy, it can lead to bullying from the child’s peers (Rosenbaum 2010). In a study about parental toy purchases, FisherThompson (1993) found that parents often buy gendered toys because their children had asked for them, and parents are slightly less likely to buy toys specifically targeted towards girls for their daughters otherwise.

It is well known that play greatly contributes to the cognitive and social development of children, and different types

of play teach children different skills (Piaget, 1962). In a study, Blakemore and Centers (2005) asked hundreds of participants to rate whether a large variety of toys were suited for boys, girls, or both, and based on this, placed these toys in five categories: “strongly masculine, moderately masculine, neutral, moderately feminine, and strongly feminine,” with Play-Doh, Xylophone, Etch-a-Sketch, and wooden blocks included as examples of “neutral” toys. They then asked participants to fill out questionnaires to measure different qualities of some of these toys, and found that “neutral” and “moderately masculine” toys were rated as more “likely to be educational and to develop children’s physical, cognitive, artistic, and other skills” than toys in other categories. Though, highly gendered toys also have education value. Rating toys on how complex the play behavior is, Cherney et al (2003) found that only toys drawing on female stereotypes, such as a kitchen set or a doll, led to high levels of play complexity in both genders. Lever (1976) suggests that, while boys’ play equips children with skills necessary for “occupational careers,” girls’ play equips children with skills needed for “family careers,” speculating that this contributes towards the traditional roles of men and women in society.

It has been argued that gender is not innate, but rather gender norms are learned through interaction (Trier-Bieniek and Leavy, 2014). According to Judith Butler (2004), a prominent queer theorist, “women’s and men’s roles and status are socially constructed and subject to change.” In contrast to this, others argue that gender roles and gendered toy preferences are not due to socialization, but are natural occurrences

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rooted in biology, as researchers have found a correlation between masculine toy preferences and play behaviors, and higher testosterone levels in both male and female children (Hönekopp and Thierfelder, 2009; Berenbaum and Hines, 1992). Additionally, in experiments done with vervet monkeys, female monkeys spent more time playing with “girlish toys” (a doll and a pan) than they did playing with “boyish toys” (a police car and a ball), comparable to gender preferences demonstrated in previous studies done with children (Alexander and Hines, 2002). According to Alexander and Hines (2002), this implies that these preferences are related to biological sex. However, in a study conducted by Cherney et al. (2003), young girls demonstrated a preference for toys that are not perceived as specifically “female” over those that are.

When granting several 18-47 month-old children complete freedom over their choice of toys to play with, the researchers found that, while boys spent an almost equal amount of time playing with “male” and “neutral” toys, and almost no time playing with “female” toys, girls played with “neutral” toys for the longest and spent relatively less time playing with toys that adults perceive as “male” or “female.” Furthermore, girls spent more time playing with “male” toys than they did with “female” toys. Based on a series of studies involving children from 50-67 months old, Martin et al. (1995) suggest that labeling toys by gender contributes to the development of gender stereotypes, stating that, children classify and simplify information in attempt to make sense of their environment, which leads them to believe that toys liked by boys should be disliked by girls, and that toys liked by girls should be disliked by boys. According to Trautner et al. (2005), children between the ages of 5 and 7 years old (60-84 months) have the most

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rigid views about gender differences and are most affected by gender stereotypes, after which their understanding of gender difference becomes increasingly more flexible.

2.2

Actions, Activism and Reactions

Many actions have been taken in attempt to reduce, eliminate or provoke reactions about the gender stereotyping of toys internationally.

Some toy-related companies have taken the initiative and have made efforts to reduce gender stereotyping in their toy marketing. Top Toy, a major Swedish toy company which runs close to fifty Toys R Us retail stores in northern Europe, has made its toy catalog gender-neutral, depicting both boys and girls playing with all kinds of toys, including girls playing with guns and boys playing with dolls (Mustich, 2013).

Though, when a French company released a similar catalog as a response to customer demand, while many parents “welcomed the catalog,” others have called for a boycott of the company responsible, and some have labeled the catalog as “brainwashing” and “male hatred” (Greco, 2013). Some retail stores, such as Hamleys in the London, have began removing the gendered labeling from their stores (Evans, 2011), and Harrods in London has re-arranged the layout of their store, organizing toys by common themes rather than by gender (Topping, 2012). Groups of parents continue to advocate for such changes through campaigns such as Let Toys Be Toys (Let Toys Be Toys, 2014a), which is based in the United Kingdom, and Play Unlimited (Play Unlimited, 2013), which is based in Australia.

Figure 2—Goldie Blox (n.d.)

Figure 3—Lego Friends (n.d.a)

Figure 4—Gender-neutral Easy

Bake Oven (n.d.b)

Other companies have taken a very different approach to the problem, creating toys that might be described as being reverse-gendered (Michalik, 4014). A notable example is Goldie Blox (Goldieblox.com, 2014). Goldie Blox produces pink and pastel-colored construction toys with rounded corners, which feature female characters (figure 2), in an effort to encourage more girls to go into the field of engineering. According to their website, “by designing a construction toy from the female perspective, [they] aim to disrupt the pink aisle and inspire the future generation of female engineers” (Goldieblox.com, 2014). Though young Riley, who has become somewhat of a poster-child for the movement against gender-stereotypical toys (ABC News, 2011), has endorsed Goldie Blox (Goldie Blox, 2012), others, such as Elizabeth Sweet (2013), a sociologist who studies gender inequality, are less enthusiastic. Sweet wrote in a blog post, “Instead of more pink building sets, we need more toys that include a broad spectrum of colors (including pink) and diverse themes and which are marketed inclusively to both boys and girls” (Sweet, 2013). Another example of reverse-gendering is McDonald’s collection of pink Spider-Man toys targeting girls, which were sold along side standard blue and red Spider-Man toys (Asher-Perrin, 2014).

In 2012, Lego launched their ‘Friends’ line of construction sets (figure 3), which was developed specifically to sell more Lego sets to girls and has been incredibly successful in doing so (Ulaby, 2013). Within a year, an online petition asking the company to stop producing separate lines for girls and boys had collected over 47 thousand signatures, and Lego has responded by defending their design choices, explaining that the Friends line is the result of four years of research into how to make their toys appealing to girls (Martin, 2012). Though, it is debatable whether these results are due to nature or nurture. Bailey Shoemaker Richards, one of the petitions sponsors, expressed the following opinion: “Well, I think part of the problem with Lego’s marketing is that it’s very market research based. I mean, they’ve looked at what is going to sell to girls, so when you market pink princesses and beauty to girls from the time they’re infants, by the time they’re in Lego’s target market for this line, which is about five and up, they’re going to associate pink, pretty, you

Ungendering Childhood—Background and Related Work

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know, this very specific gender role with what they think they’re supposed to be playing with. It’s all they’ve been marketed their entire lives, so of course, that’s what Lego’s marketing research is going to find” (Martin, 2012).

Children have become activists regarding these issues as well.

Hasbro announced a gender-neutral Easy Bake Oven (figure 4) in 2012 after 13-year-old McKenna Pope started an online petition, which got more than 40,000 signatures (Smith, 2012).

In 2014, Pope gave a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk about her experience, calling others to action (Pope, 2014). In 2008, 11-year-old Antonia Ayres-Brown wrote a letter to the CEO of McDonald’s, expressing her frustration over her family being asked whether they wanted a “girl toy” or “boy toy” with the Happy Meal they had ordered (Ayres-Brown 2014). McDonald’s replied by stating that their employees are not trained to do this and that her experience was not standard. Revisiting this in 2013, Ayres-Brown and her father conduced an independent study, sending boys and girls to several McDonald’s locations in the United States. For each of the 30 visits, a child was asked to order a Happy Meal at the counter. More than 90 percent of the time, the children were given the toy targeted towards their gender without being given a choice, and more than 40 percent of the time, employees refused to exchange the unopened toy for a toy

targeted towards another gender2. Ayres-Brown wrote to the new McDonald’s CEO, explaining these results, and received a response letter stating that the company had reexamined their practices and were making efforts to prevent employees from referencing customers’ genders and classifying the toys as “boy” or “girl” toys.

Rather than aiming to persuade companies to change their practices, some projects have aspired to provoke reactions.

In 1993, a group calling themselves the Barbie Liberation Organization switched the voice boxes of talking Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls and placed them back on the shelves of toy stores in multiple cities across the United States (Firestone, 1993). Leaflets including the group’s phone number were also placed in these doll packages, and upon calling the number, one would here this message: “Obviously, our goal is to get media attention. We are trying to make a statement about the way toys can encourage negative behavior in children, particularly given rising acts of violence and sexism” (Firestone, 1993).

To visualize the effect toy marketing has on children, JeongMee Yoon captured a series of photographs showing South Korean and American girls and boys in their bedrooms with their collections of pink and blue toys and possesions (Rosenberg, 2013).

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Throughout this thesis, I abstain from using phrases such as “both genders” and “opposite gender” in order to avoid implying that there are only two genders or that boys/men and girls/women are opposites.

3. Collaborative Process, Design Materials and Workshop Design

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3.1

Collaboration with Let Toys Be Toys

During my thesis research, I collaborated with Let Toys Be Toys, a parent-led volunteer activist organization that has been campaigning to remove gendered labeling from toy stores and packaging in the United Kingdom and Ireland (Let Toys Be Toys, 2014a). They were founded on the idea that play has an important role in a child’s development and that children should make their own decisions about which toys they play with and what kind of themes their play entails (Let Toys Be Toys, 2014b).

They take the stance that all toys are for children of all genders and that it is not the design of the toys that is a problem, but rather the marketing of the toys and the labels they are given (Liz)3. This collaboration gave me an opportunity to learn from experienced activists and ground my design process on their expertise, adopting their objectives to inform my design decisions. In exchange, I provided them with design work for one of their ongoing projects.

3.1.1 Project for Schools and My Role

When I approached Let Toys Be Toys about collaborating with them, I was invited to join a new project about challenging gender stereotypes in schools. The primary goal was to make educational resources concerning the gender stereotypes surrounding toys and play available to English schoolteachers. A project team consisting of a diverse group of people with different backgrounds and interests related to the topic was assembled. The team included members of the Let Toys Be Toys organization, LGBT activists, diversity specialists who work in schools, and engineers who have worked toward the goal of encouraging young girls to take an interest in engineering—many of them being parents as well. It was decided that the project team would develop original lesson plans for one or more of the ‘key stages’ of the national curriculum (England, Wales and Northern Ireland), collect useful resources for teachers regarding issues relevant to gender stereotypes in schools, and then make the lesson plan materials and resources gathered easily accessible through a webpage. I purposed the development of a lesson toolkit and took on the role of 3

Names in italics refer to people I have personally corresponded with during my collaboration with Let Toys Be Toys.

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Ungendering Childhood— Collaborative Process, Design Materials and Workshop Design

designing such, which could become the project’s lesson plan for the ‘key stage 3’ grade levels (ages 11–14). The project is still ongoing, and Let Toys Be Toys intends to test the lesson plans that were developed for different ‘key stages’ over the course of this project in English schools before distributing them online.

A private Facebook group was used as the primary tool for correspondence between members of the project team. This was a convenient portal for sharing web links, resources and ideas, though there were some drawbacks to depending on it so heavily. It was difficult for the group to come to an agreement and was often unclear if an agreement had been made at all. Since many different suggestions and opinions were expressed through the Facebook group without an obvious consensus, I formed a co-constructed design brief by synthesizing the ideas that did not get any strong objections.

This helped initiate discussion on how design could be used to further the goals of the project and acted as a starting point to begin designing. I continuously adjusted the design brief as feedback and opinions were shared, going through several iterations (Figure 5). I used this iterative process of getting feedback and re-constructing the design brief to communicate a shared understanding and guide my design decisions, continuing this process as I conceptualized and prototyped the design.

The final version of the design brief was as follows: “The goal of the project is to develop a webpage for English schoolteachers that will provide resources about gender stereotypes in schools and the gender stereotyping of toys. This page will

include links to existing resources as well as original lesson plans and activities geared towards one or more of the ‘key stages’ of the English school system, which would encourage children to think critically about gender stereotyping in relation to toys and play. The lesson plans should somehow tie into the national curriculum, one strong possibility being the Design and Technology curriculum.

Activities could be toy-designing or toy-building activities, and may make use of gamification and/or digital components. It is important that all materials could be easily distributed online and can be reproduced at very little cost.”

3.1.2 National ‘Design and Technology’

Curriculum as a Framework

The primary reason Let Toys Be Toys decided to develop original lesson plans for UK schools rather than recommending ADL’s existing lesson plan about toys and gender (Anti-Defamation League, 2013) on their webpage is that UK schools follow their curriculum more strictly than schools in the United States (Rode et al., 2003), where ADL is based. The ‘Design and Technology’ segment of the national curriculum was selected as a framework for designing the lesson toolkit, based on suggestions from members of the group.

The ‘Design and Technology’ curriculum aims to teach students to design, evaluate and prototype products, as well as apply technical knowledge (Department for Education, 2013). A lesson regarding toys and gender could potentially fulfill some of the requirements for teaching product design and evaluation. Though the curriculum’s exact requirements differ across the different ‘key stages,’ in general, for the design and evaluation parts of the curriculum, students are expected

Ungendering Childhood—Collaborative Process, Design Materials and Workshop Design

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Design & Technology curriculum Toy building activity

resources & lesson plans distributed online

gamification

Co-constructed Design Breif & conceptualization

FITTING ROOM

Facebo

ok Gro up

next steps: testing of lesson plans

Missing information

feedback from group

Figure 5 A visualization showing the iterative process of forming the design breif and conceptualizing the toolkit design. Here, the Facebook group is represented by a clothing rack, and the ideas shared on the page are represented by clothing hanging on the rack. Missing information that I needed from the group is represented by the missing peice of the barcode on the clothing tag , and moving on to test the toolkit is represented by a fitting room.

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to learn how to develop and communicate product design ideas based on an understanding of user needs and analyze a range of existing products (Department for Education, 2013).

A concern that had to be taken into account when designing within this framework was that it is difficult for an individual without any teaching experience to judge the difficulty level of a lesson in respect to a particular age group based on a curriculum document alone (Rode et al., 2003). I relied on project team members’ experience and familiarity with the curriculum and the English school system to help me better gauge the difficulty level. During the design process, they determined that the lesson I had been working on was best suited for the ‘key stage 3’ grade levels.

3.1.3 Designing a Printable Lesson Toolkit

for Schools In deciding what form the toolkit should take and what materials to use, it was important to consider how it could be inexpensively distributed online. I proposed some relatively inexpensive tangible solutions suitable for online distribution, but after some discussion with members of the group, it became apparent that due to the financial restraints of schools and the limited amount of time teachers can spare to prepare materials for a lesson, a lesson toolkit using printable pieces that could be prepared quickly and easily would be more plausible.

The organization member who initiated this project shared a rough draft of a lesson plan, which I used this as a starting point for designing a lesson toolkit. Among many things,

the draft asked students to re-design a toy’s packaging so that it would appeal to both girls and boys. The lesson fit well with the evaluation requirement of the ‘Design and Technology’ curriculum, but in order to better fit the ‘Design and Technology’ curriculum’s requirement for designing products, I decided that the lesson toolkit I would develop should involve designing the toys themselves rather than their packaging or advertisements. Since the ‘Design and Technology’ curriculum also states that students should learn to design based on user needs, I chose to incorporate personas, which are fictional users used to focus on designing for specific individuals (Chang, Lim and Stolterman, 2008), into the lesson toolkit. These personas would be children ages 5–6 and would come in pairs, having common interests and their genders as variable factors.

It was crucial to the design of lesson that the genders of the personas would not be easily assumed. In other words, they needed to be somewhat gender-ambiguous. For the first prototype of the lesson toolkit, I used silhouetted stock illustrations of children. Though I selected the most genderneutral silhouettes I could find, members of the project team still had a very clear impression of the children’s genders. I also tried to use gender-neutral names, though found that many names that are gender-neutral in the United States are not so in the United Kingdom and vice versa. Some members of the team helped me compile a short list of names that would be recognized as gender-neutral in the UK, and I used these in the final design. In attempt to make the personas more gender-ambiguous in appearance, I created original illustrations. Illustrating the personas also provided me with

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an opportunity to incorporate personas’ common interests into the image and give them some personality (figure 6). Though, illustrating them in a way that would be interpreted as gender-ambiguous proved to be challenging.

While drawing the personas, I continuously asked a group of my peers how they perceived the gender of the children. They were able to point out the cues that they interpreted as masculine or feminine, and in response, I would either remove this aspect or try to balance it out by modifying another aspect of the illustration.

For example, when the pose of one of the personas was interpreted as being very masculine, I gave that child long curly hair, which was perceived as more feminine.

People responded to illustrations without strong gender cues with uncertainty and to illustrations with opposing gender cues with conflicting opinions. I felt that both forms of gender-ambiguity would work equally well for the purpose of the lesson toolkit, which is intended to be used in groups.

Alex

6 years old

Rowan

5 years old

Sam

6 years old

Ashli

5 years old

3.1.4 The ‘Key Stage 3’ Let Toys Be Toys Lesson Toolkit

The Let Toys Be Toys lesson toolkit for the ‘key stage 3’ grade levels, which could be downloaded as a PDF file and printed on standard A3 and A4 sized paper, contains: • An instruction sheet for teachers • 12 interest cards (animals, family role-play, battle, magic, outer space, science, art, cooking, music, dinosaurs, sports, and fantasy) • Male and female gender markers • 3 different placement mat worksheets featuring a unique pair of personas • 3 information sheets demonstrating existing gender-stereotypical toys • 3 sketching templates for designing different types of toys • 4 discussion worksheets At the beginning of the lesson, the students are divided into or asked to form groups, and the toolkit materials are distributed. Each group of students is assigned one of the three pairs of personas, which can be found on the placement mat worksheet.

There are three rectangular spaces on each placement mat for the personas’ shared

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Ungendering Childhood— Collaborative Process, Design Materials and Workshop Design

Robin

Taylor

5 years old

6 years old

Figure 6—Illustrated personas

RC Car Use this template to design and color a version of the toy and packaging that would appeal to both children based on any number of their shared interests.

Add as much as you’d like and be creative.

Describe your toy:

Use this template to design and color a version of the toy and packaging that would appeal to both children based on any number of their shared interests.

Add as much as you’d like and be creative.

Describe your toy:

Castle Playset Use this template to design and color a version of the toy and packaging that would appeal to both children based on any number of their interests. Add as much as you’d like and be creative.

Describe your toy:

Figure 7 Blank Sketching Templates

interests, two of which are empty and one of which is pre-filled in with a fixed interest (“Knights & Royalty,” “Cars & Vehicles,” or “Building Things”). A teacher or facilitator can fill the empty spaces with randomly selected interest cards, or the students can choose from the selection of interest cards and place them themselves.

Alternatively, custom interests could be written into the spaces.

Once all of the shared interests are decided on, the students are tasked with answering the first of four discussion questions, which asks: “Do you think these two children would enjoy playing together? What kind of toys or games might they play? How might they interact?” After each discussion question, the students fill their answers into the appropriate discussion worksheet. This could be done individually or as a group.

Next, a teacher or facilitator assigns genders by placing gender markers in the empty spaces next to the illustrations, making one in each pair male and the other female. Afterwards, students answer the second discussion question: “Do you think the gender difference changes your previous answer? Would gender stereotypes affect the way they’d play together? If so, how?”

After completing the second discussion question, students are asked to examine existing, highly gendered toy designs. Each group should have a page featuring images and descriptions of two toys that fall under the same category (castle play set, radio controlled car, or construction block kit, depending on their personas’ fixed shared interest): one aimed at boys and one at girls. After reviewing this information, they move on to the third discussion: “How do you know which toy is targeted towards boys and which is targeted towards girls? How might children react if a girl played with the ‘boy’s toy’?

If a boy played with the ‘girl’s toy’?”

The next task is to design a toy for the personas based on any number of their shared interests using the sketching templates (figure 7) provided in the toolkit, which are simple black outlines of generic toys. These templates match up with the personas fixed shared interests thematically and are similar to the existing toy

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designs examined in the previous step. After completing the design activity, students answer the fourth and final discussion question: “Why do you think your designs appeal to these two children?

How do you think these two children would use these toys?” Following the final discussion, it is up to the teacher or facilitator to wrapup the lesson with the class, which can be done by asking each group to introduce their personas and explain their designs.

3.2

Collaboration with Interaction Design Students

Moving away from designing for a classroom setting, the lesson toolkit developed for Let Toys Be Toys was used as a foundation for the creation of a set of tangible design materials, which would be used sequentially to form a design workshop suitable for different groupings of stakeholders. Since the toolkit was of a relatively high level for children and one of its main purposes was to teach design, it lent itself well for this context.

Throughout the process of generating the design materials and planning their use within prospective design workshops, I collaborated with a group of six first-year Interaction Design Engineering bachelor’s degree students at the University of Southern Denmark. After introducing them to the Let Toys Be Toys project and relevant issues, I involved them in testing the materials and used their feedback and suggestions to develop the materials further and form a plan for future design workshops. After two sessions with the whole group, some of the Interaction Design students acted as research assistants, helping to facilitate and document a workshop with their upperclassmen as participants. Allowing others to

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facilitate provided me with an opportunity to learn from their individual facilitation styles and the impact this had on the outcome of using the design materials.

3.2.1 Design of a Tangible Persona Toolkit

During the first session with the Interaction Design students, I tested the lesson toolkit that I had been developing for Let Toys Be Toys with the students, their professor, and their assistant teacher as participants. They were divided into three groups, each of which tried the activity with a different pair of personas. Reflecting on their experience, they felt that the toolkit would be more engaging and be of higher quality if it were made more tangible. Tangible design materials can act as “things-to-think-with” and help participants focus (Brandt and Messeter, 2004). A problem that occurred during the test, since all of the materials were distributed at the start, was that the groups started reading the worksheets before they were instructed to do so. With this in mind, I designed a tangible version of the toolkit that deliberately conceals information and allows this information to be revealed when necessary, without adding an excessive amount of work for the facilitator.

This resulting persona toolkit (figure 8) differs from the lesson toolkit developed for Let Toys Be Toys mainly through its tangibility, transformability and flexibility. Each pair of personas is positioned on the top of a box, which contains a rotating column that reveals one of four discussion questions at a time. The top of the box can be removed, providing easy access to the column and making the questions easy to replace. Thin, labeled blocks that fit into indents on the top of the box are used to represent the non-fixed interests

Ungendering Childhood— Collaborative Process, Design Materials and Workshop Design

and gender markers. The box also has a slide-out panel built in, which contains the image and description of an existing stereotypically male toy and an existing stereotypically female toy associated with the personas’ fixed shared interest (figure 9).

3.2.2 Design of a Self-Reflective Game

The Interaction Design students proposed that an introduction activity might have helped engage them before starting the toolkit activities. Based on their suggestions, I decided to create a warm-up activity that would prompt participants to start thinking about toys and play by asking them to consider the types of toys and games they enjoyed as a child. This activity took the form of a game, as games can be used to engage players in a social issue through themes, narratives and interactions (Flanagan, 2009). I attempted to use this game as an opportunity to prime participants to begin reflecting on gender stereotypes regarding the toys and games they have played with in the past, with the goal of provoking player interaction and encouraging participants to share stories about their childhood play experiences.

Figure 8—Tangible persona toolkit

Figure 9—Slide-out panel for gendered toy comparison

The self-reflective game I created for this purpose (figure 10) was based on the classic game Mikado (also known as pick up sticks). The goal of the game Mikado is to collect sticks, which have to be picked up from a pile without moving any of the other sticks in the process. Unlike regular Mikado sticks, the sticks created for this game all have descriptions of a type of toy or play written on them. These sticks are color-coded by whether the type of toy or game it describes is typically thought to be for boys, for girls, or to be gender nonspecific. Sticks in the “for boys” category are yellow, sticks in

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the “for girls” category are orange, and sticks in the “gender non-specific” category are green. Colors that society strongly associates with a specific gender were avoided in order to make the meaning of the colors less obvious to participants at first glance, with the goal of making the participants think about the relationship between sticks of the same color and draw their own conclusions as to what the colors mean.

I tested this game with the Interaction Design students during the second session, trying out several iterations of the rules.

As a group, we decided on a set of rules that both worked well and was thought to be the most fun: • Hold the sticks vertically on top of the table and drop them • Take turns in a circle and try to pick up a stick from the middle that describes a toy or game that you enjoyed playing with as a child without moving any of the other sticks • You may use any sticks that you have already collected to help you pick up the sticks in the middle • If you move any of the other sticks, drop the stick you were attempting to take and leave it in place • If you do not succeed, your turn is over • If you pick up the stick successfully, you may try to pick up another • You may pass your turn entirely or end it at any time • If the person before you ends their turn by failing to pick up a stick and you choose to pass your turn, you may steal one of their sticks.

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The results of these tests were encouraging. While testing the game, the color-coding worked as intended; the meaning of the colors was not obvious at first, but over the course of the game, the participants noticed a pattern. There was also a lot of discussion about certain toys and games, especially during the first iterations, before the Interaction Design students familiarized themselves with the set of sticks.

Some of the participants were not sure what certain toys and games were, so others explained. They also expressed excitement when talking about some of the toys that were popular among the group and exchanged stories. Though, the students testing the game were already familiar with the game’s purpose and goals.

After testing the game, the Interaction Design students discussed which toys and games should be excluded, and which toys and games that were omitted they felt should have been included. The final design of the game was adjusted based on this, having a total of twenty-one sticks: seven sticks in the “for boys” category (toy cars, action figures, LEGO, science toys, battle role-play, sports, and dinosaurs), seven sticks in the “for girls” category (female dolls, male dolls, baby dolls, family role-play, dress-up, housework toys, and cooking toys), and seven sticks in the “gender non-specific” category (puzzles, toy instruments, board games, tag, hide and seek, floor is lava, and toy animals).

Ungendering Childhood— Collaborative Process, Design Materials and Workshop Design

3.2.3 Design of a Reflective Gender-

Mapping Tool

The Interaction Design students thought that an activity to reflect on the designs created for the personas would be an advantageous way to wrap up the toolkit activities. They were interested in investigating whether or not there is a difference between a “gender-neutral” toy and a “genderless” toy, since they realized they were using these two phrases interchangeably.

They were also interested in exploring what kinds of qualities influence whether a toy is perceived as gendered, genderless or gender-neutral. This yielded new sub-question to the main inquiry pursued by this thesis:

Figure 10—Custom Mikado sticks

Are there different ways in which a toy can be ungendered?

Figure 11—Gender-mapping tool

As a response to this inquiry, I designed a gender-mapping tool (figure 11) for the purpose of supporting a process of reflection through the mapping of perceived relationships between gender and individual qualities of a design (such as theme, color, shapes, featured characters, roles of play, and types of interactions) and the evaluation of the overall perceived gender of the toy. When designing this tool, I kept the distinction between the perception of “genderneutral” and “genderless” in mind, though I instead focused distinguishing between what is perceived as being gendered for “both” boys and girls (for example, including both stereotypically male and female elements or roles) and being gendered for “neither” boys or girls (not including any gender stereotypes and thus having no perceived gender at all), which I speculated would be a more concrete distinction to clarify.

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Ungendering Childhood— Collaborative Process, Design Materials and Workshop Design

The gender-mapping tool has a circular spectrum of color going from blue to purple, from purple to pink, from pink to white, and then from white back around to blue. The bluest point is labeled “boyish,” the pinkest point labeled “girlish,” the most purple point labeled “both,” and the whitest point labeled “neither.” Around the outside of this color spectrum is a rotating plastic disc labeled “qualities,” which could be written on with marker and used like an erasable white board.

There is another rotating disc with an arrow labeled “overall” in the center of the color spectrum is, which could be used to point to a position on the spectrum representative of how the toy is thought to be gendered overall.

3.2.4 Forming a Workshop

Used in sequence, the three design materials (the self-reflective game, persona toolkit and gender-mapping tool respectively) constitute a collaborative design workshop.

Since building tangible mock-ups can evoke reflection during collaborative design processes (Brandt, 2005), during the second session with the Interaction Design Students, I asked each group to build a 3D mock-up of a toy design, continuing with the same personas from the first test. After reflecting on the process of using the blank templates to design toys individually and then building a mock-up, we came to the conclusion that though the templates could be a good starting point for children, it would be preferable for designers to sketch their concepts without being restricted by the templates. The Interaction Design students felt that the sketching and building activities were equally valuable, with the building activity being more collaborative and engaging,

and the sketching phase being a necessary step leading up to this. Therefore, it was decided that for the subsequent workshops, participants would sketch individually and then move on to build a single concept as a group after answering the last discussion question, which asks participants to talk about why they think their designs appeal to the two personas and how those two children would play with the toy.

I planned the workshop to be ninety minutes long, assigning each step of the design material activities an approximate time frame, and tested the workshop with two pairs of second-year Interaction Design students. Each pair of students was given a box of supplies, which contained markers, colored pencils, a glue stick, doubled sided tape, scissors, multi-colored paper, a piece of foam core, and play dough in three colors: red, blue and yellow. The workshop took place in the first-year Interaction Design students’ studio, and participants could also use any other supplies that could be found in the room.

I asked two first-year Interaction Design students to act as facilitators, each working with one of the pairs of secondyear students. Another first-year student documented one of the pairs, while I documented the other pair. The role of the facilitators was to introduce and explain each step of the workshop, using their own judgment to decide when to move on to the step throughout, allowing for flexibility in the timing of each activity as suggested by Nieters and Bollman (2011).

The facilitators also participated in the self-reflective game and were additionally responsible for answering any questions participants had, making sure the participants were aware of the supplies that were available, and probing for further

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discussion when they felt that it was necessary. I allowed the facilitators to choose which personas their group would work with; one chose the personas with the shared interest of “Knights & Royalty ” and the other chose the personas that had a shared interest in “Cars & Vehicles.” The role of the documenters was to start and stop the voice recorder, take pictures, and keep notes on key events and points of discussion. In addition to documenting one of the two groups, I was available to answer any questions that students facilitating had during the workshop.

The next iteration of the workshop was a multi-stakeholder co-design workshop with a father, his 11-year-old son, and two IT Product Design Master’s students as participants.

I asked them to work with the personas that have shared interest in “Building Things,” which was not used in the previous workshop, so that each of the three pairs of personas would be used exactly once during the workshops. Since I was both facilitating and documenting, I chose to document this workshop with video rather than audio recording. As the facilitator, I took on a somewhat participatory role in discussion, though I chose not to participate in the self-reflective game, since there were more participants in this group than there were in the groups during the iteration before. I also made slight adjustments to the workshop procedure based on occurrences and initial analysis of documentation from the previous workshop.

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3.3

Reflection on Stakeholder-Informed Design Decisions

I based many of my design decisions on stakeholder needs and suggestions, in some sense allowing the design process to unfold itself, which also determined the orientation, methods and analytical positioning of my research. Though my original intension was to design a tangible business model to help convince toy companies to design for gender-neutrality, upon teaming up with Let Toys be Toys, I changed my focus in response to the activists groups’ needs, and by taking advantage of their project as a foundation for my inquiry, I was afforded a shortcut. Unable to make arrangements to test the lesson toolkit I developed with Let Toys Be Toys in schools, I took advantage of the opportunity to continue the design process unconstrained, in collaboration with a group of design students. While I was unable to experience the toolkit from the perspective of a participant myself, the Interaction Design students were able to do this in my place.

By involving them in the design process, I was able to take advantage of their suggestions, leading me to make design decisions I would not have considered otherwise. These two groups of stakeholders—one with little knowledge of design, but extensive knowledge of activism and issues surrounding the gendering of children’s toys, and another who had not thought deeply about the issue previously, but had some design experience—each provided unique perspectives, which helped me go deeper into the issue than I would have been able to if I had approached the problem on my own.

Ungendering Childhood— Collaborative Process, Design Materials and Workshop Design

4. Analysis, Results and Discussion

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4.1 Reflection Instigated by the Design Process In discussing design choices, activists began to reflect on and question their own views and methods, and designers became more aware of how stereotypes could affect the way they approach design.

In general, Let Toys Be Toys focuses on trying to change the way toys are marketed, though the lesson toolkit focuses more on the way toys are designed. Considering this, though they were reluctant to discuss it, questions concerning whether the gender stereotyping of toys is purely a marketing problem, or if the design plays a role as well, were raised. Looking at examples of existing gendered toys used in the toolkit, one of the members of the group mentioned that she could not see a boy playing with the “girl’s” version, even if it did not have any packaging or marketing affiliated with it, which initiated reflection on why that is. It was discussed that, regardless of individual beliefs about whether or not there should be an association between color and gender, the fact that society perceives pink as being for girls and blue as being for boys cannot be changed in short order. Besides the obvious color differences of the toys, the group noticed some other factors that led to the toy designs seeming gender-specific and hypothesized that the “boy’s” toy probably works better based on their past experiences buying children’s products marketed towards boys and children’s products marketed towards girls.

Upon reflecting on their experience working with the design materials, the Interaction Design students affirmed that, though the gendering of children’s toys was never an issue

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Ungendering Childhood— Analysis, Results and Discussion

they put much thought into before, their involvement in this process provoked reflection on the matter. When introduced to the topic, they became eager to share their opinions and experiences, and while working with the design materials, became aware of how they think differently about play depending on the gender of the children being considered.

The thematic difference between toys targeted towards boys and toys targeted towards girls became obvious to them, going as far as to say that they found it offensive (Rasmussen et al., n.d.).

In addition to gaining new insights into the generation of design materials with activism as an end result, involving stakeholders throughout the design process can act as a form of activism itself. Reflection on the issue at hand may be evoked while designing the materials, leaving stakeholders with a greater awareness of the issue and encouraging them to reflect on their own practices and stance on the issue, which may help lead to change. In this case, for example, activists may be encouraged to consider new ways of approaching the problem, and toy designers may be encouraged to try to change the way toys are designed, working from within the companies designing them.

4.2

Using the Reflective Design Materials

The self-reflective Mikado game, tangible persona toolkit, and gender-mapping tool were tested by three groups: two groups that used the materials during the workshop with design students, and one multi-stakeholder group that used the materials during a co-design workshop. In addition three

Table 1—Workshop groups and personas

test of paper toolkit

workshop with design students

multi-stakeholder workshop

Participants

Facilitator

personas

interests

Sara & Wafa

Myself

Robin & Taylor

Knights & Royalty, Cooking, Battle Role-play

Nelle, Sanne & Silver

Myself

Rowan & Ashli

Cars & Vehicles, Art, & Dinosaurs

Wendy, Tudor & Mathais

Myself

Alex & Sam

Building Things, Animals, & Family Role-play

Vicki & Thomas

Sara

Robin & Taylor

Knights & Royalty, Science, & Fantasy

Gitte & Shelly

Nelle

Rowan & Ashli

Cars & Vehicles, Music & Animals

Stefan, Henrike, James & Patrick

Myself

Alex & Sam

Building Things, Science, & Fantasy

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groups tested the printable lesson toolkit during a session with the Interaction Design students that I collaborated with (see table 1). During the testing of the design materials, there were points of success and failure in terms of both provoking reflection and keeping stakeholders engaged. In addition to focusing on aspects of the designs, I highlight the influence facilitation has on the effectiveness of using the materials.

4.2.1 Playing Mikado as a Self-Reflective

Game

Overall, the Mikado game seemed to keep participants engaged in the activity. Though there is no way to win the game, participants were motivated by their desire to collect the sticks representing their favorite toys and games. They tried to be careful not to move the unwanted sticks and seemed to enjoy watching others fail to do so. They also paid close attention to the sticks that others were taking, sometimes out of curiosity, and sometimes because they hoped no one would take the stick they wanted to try for next or because they were waiting for someone to take a stick that blocked them from getting the one they wanted. The fact that their actions affected each other was an important factor and prompted them to state which sticks they wanted to claim and make suggestions to others.

When a participant suggested a choice to another participant, it was usually a type of toy or play stereotypical of the other participant’s gender, and this usually provoked a response: either stating that they didn’t play that way as a child or sharing a detail about that kind of toy or play from their childhood (see transcript 1). A father seemed surprised and

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Ungendering Childhood— Analysis, Results and Discussion

laughed when his son took the stick that had “family roleplay” written on it (see transcript 2), and in a couple of cases, female participants teased male participants by jokingly suggesting that they choose a stereotypically girly type of toy or play (see transcripts 3 and 4). Participants who made these kinds suggestions often did not admit to playing with many toys stereotypical of their gender, which may suggest that they perceive toys as being gendered, but make exceptions when it comes to themselves. These kinds of gender related exchanges only took place between participants who knew each other prior to the workshop (i.e. between classmates, and between parent and child), and none of them addressed the fact that they were implying gender stereotypes during the game, though it sometimes came up later on in the workshop. In order to invoke more reflection on stereotypes, the facilitator could make suggestions and ask questions, as the suggestions and encouragement of a facilitator during a design game can help guide the process (Brandt and Messester, 2004). Whether or not participants reflected on the gendered color-coding of the sticks also seemed to, at least partially, depend on the whether or not the facilitator said something to prompt it.

In one of test groups, the facilitator asked the participants to take a look at the sticks they had taken at the end of the game. This prompted one of the participants to ask, “Does the color mean anything?” which initiated discussion on the relationship between sticks of the same color.

4.2.2 Determining the Personas’ Genders

All of the test groups found the gender of the personas important almost immediately. Some groups discussed what genders they thought the personas were, some assumed both

Transcript 1 Excerpts from an ongoing exchange between two

Interaction Design students

Thomas: If you want the baby dolls, you’ve got to work for it.

Transcript 3 An exchange between two Interaction Design students

Vicki: No, I didn’t play with baby dolls, actually.

Vicki: I don’t think Thomas played with female dolls.

Thomas: Come on, dress-up. Like a princess or something.

Thomas: Sure I did. [sarcastic]

Vicki: I actually have a picture where I have a lot of clothes on. I couldn’t move my arms any more.

…

Vicki: Then you can take the sports.

Transcript 4 An exchange between two IT Product Design students

Thomas: I didn’t do that many sports.

Henrike: Family role-play?

Stefan & Henrike: (laughing)

Transcript 2 An exchange between a father and his son Patrick: I’ll take... (takes the stick with “family role-play” written on it) James [Patrick’s father]: Okay (laughs)

Ungendering Childhood— Analysis, Results and Discussion

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personas were boys, and others asked the facilitator. When the facilitator responded to inquiries about the genders of the personas with, “does it matter?” in one instance, and “not necessarily, it’s up to you,” in another, the groups stopped discussing the gender of the personas entirely. Interestingly, after being asked, “does it matter?” a participant who claimed that not knowing the gender of the personas annoyed her seemed very reluctant to talk about gender throughout the rest of the workshop, continually stating that she didn’t think the gender of the children made any difference. It is possible that she began to worry that expressing anything to the contrary would come off as sexist. If that were the case, while it might have discouraged further discussion, it would not necessarily be bad for the purpose of activism. In another case, when a group was discussing the gender of a persona, one of the participants said that, due to the fact that the persona was pictured playing with toy cars, even though she thought ‘Ashli’ was more of a girl’s name and that the illustration looked like it could be a girl, she imagined the persona in question as male. This could be seen as somewhat of a success, since it might have brought gender stereotyping to the participant’s attention. Though, another group interpreted the personas with the names ‘Alex’ and ‘Sam’ as being boys without question. Even though these names are common nicknames for both male and female names, the participants explained that they were more familiar with these names as male and noted the cultural differences in naming conventions. This was a failure to attain the goal of the personas being genderambiguous.

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When designing the persona toolkit, I hadn’t considered the significant difference between letting participant’s use their own judgment to interpret the personas’ genders and implying that the personas are of an unknown gender prior to discussing how they would play together. The facilitators’ responses to questions about the genders of the personas ended discussion rather than encouraging further reflection.

“What do you think?” might have been a better response if continued discussion on this matter was the goal, which in at least one instance related to the toy the persona was pictured playing with. Though in the case of these workshops, the aim was to encourage reflection on how children’s genders might influence the way people expect them to play rather than on what gender people expect a child to be based on what they play with.

4.2.3 Comparison Between the Tangible

and Paper Toolkits

I did not find any evidence that tangibility made the toolkit more engaging, though the transformability of the tangible toolkit did seem to serve its purpose of hiding and revealing information to help keep the participants focused on the task at hand. When testing the paper toolkit, participants were distracted by the many worksheets they had in front of them, though when using the tangible version of the toolkit, groups of participants were focused on the one box shared between them and the information that was presented to them at the time. Since the selection of the personas’ additional interests was the only situation that involved participants physically handling the tangible pieces, the pieces did not especially function as “things-to-think-with” (Brandt and Messeter,

2004), but instead acted only as things-to-discuss. To improve upon this and promote further reflection, additional toolkit pieces could be introduced to be used during the process of introspection and discussion.

the group described it as a “fairy tale.” Reflecting afterwards, one of the participants expressed that she was surprised at herself for imagining the children in gender-stereotypical roles.

4.2.4 Creating a Scenario of Play

The creation of scenarios has been well established as a method within the field of interaction design and can reveal various details and views of a design problem, providing new insights (Brandt and Messester, 2004). Though other groups did not develop scenarios of play, these scenarios seemed to be effective in revealing certain ways participants may practice gender stereotyping regarding how children play. Those who think they are open-minded about gender issues may not realize how they are affected by gender stereotypes and may come to discover this through reflection when discussing scenarios of play between children of dynamic genders.

While the theme of knights and royalty is suggestively readily associated with various stories and roles that are intrinsically related to gender, the other themes used in the toolkit do not seem to share this characteristic. Though, when it comes to designing toys that do not promote gender stereotypes, working with a theme that is heavily associated with gender roles may pose a greater design challenge, which may or may not be desirable. To improve the toolkit in order to support scenario creation, a design game could be used to establish different scenarios of play (Brandt and Messester, 2004).

Both groups that worked with the personas that had a shared interest in “Knights & Royalty” created a detailed scenario of how those two children (Robin and Taylor) would play together, at first deciding both personas were boys. One of the groups imagined Robin and Taylor going on an “epic quest” together, fighting monsters and dragons. When it was revealed that Robin was a girl, a male participant in the group thought that Robin would then play the role of the damsel in distress, and Taylor would have to save her. Though, a female participant disagreed, explaining she didn’t think it would “make that much of a difference” and that when she was a child, if she wanted to “be a knight” she would “be a knight.”

The other group imagined Robin as an authoritative king and Taylor as his loyal knight. Though, when it was revealed that Taylor was a boy and Robin was a girl, the scenario changed completely. Robin became a princess, and Taylor became a knight who would battle to win her over, even though she would be “mean to him.” Since the personas also had a shared interest in cooking, the group also imagined that Robin would cook for Taylor. The scenario became more of love story, and

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4.2.5 Designing Toys for Both Boys and Girls

When designing toys for the male and female personas, some participants tried to mix masculine and feminine elements, some tried to avoid gender stereotypes, and others tried to ignore gender by focusing only on the personas’ common interests alone. These design strategies were demonstrated during the individual sketching activity as well as the group building activity.

When attempting to mix elements that are stereotypically for boys with elements that are stereotypically for girls, participants were challenged with potentially causing a divide in how boys and girls might play with the toys. One example of such a design concept that arose was described as a “combination of a boy and girl castle,” including domestic play aspects inside the castle, and adventure and battle aspects outside of the castle. Reflecting on how the children would play with this toy, the participant who sketched this design explained that the “roles are still very gender specific.” This group’s personas were interested in knights and royalty, cooking and battle role-play, and while the concept the group decided to mock-up (figure 12) still involved cooking inside and combat outside, this time they included two opposing castles and tried to focus more on competition, turning the cooking aspect of the toy into a “cooking battle.” Another example, described as “combining girls’ stuff and boys’ stuff,” was a decorate-able car (figure 13), which included elements such as colored beads and flowers in order to appeal towards girls.

When testing the paper toolkit materials, one of the Interaction Design students wrote, “If I take the male and female away it will be genderless,” explaining that she tried to keep her design realistic and used neutral colors. Another group that tried to avoid gender stereotypes in their design focused on creativity rather than realism. For personas interested in knights and royalty, science, and fantasy, they came up with a concept involving a journey to the center of the earth, where a new world would be discovered. The resulting toy design (figure 14) consisted of many different elements that children could use to create their own world. They decided to build a mock-up of this design after discussing and eliminating another concept,

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Ungendering Childhood— Analysis, Results and Discussion

Figure 12 Mock-up of cooking battle/combet castle

Figure 13

Mock-up of a decorate-able car

which centered on customizing and fighting dragons. The participant who came up with this concept mentioned that he thought it would probably appeal more to the boy than the girl, and that the girl might end up playing the damsel in distress, admitting that he was “playing on stereotypes.” They decided to continue working on the more open-ended of the two concepts, since they thought otherwise it would be, “dress for the girl. Sword for the boy. Done.”

Figure 14 Mock-up of “journey to the center” concept

Figure 15 Mock-up of farm train concept

Other groups, on the other hand, were not as concerned about the genders of the children when conceptualizing and mocking-up their designs. One of the participants in a group whose personas had a shared interest in cars and vehicles, music, and animals noticed that the Hello Kitty remote control car that was presented to them as an example of a toy targeted towards girls actually incorporated all of the personas’ interests. Though, another member of the group strongly expressed that she did not think which gender a toy was intended for mattered to children, and the participants did not have a discussion about making their concept appeal to both genders. After sketching their individual designs, they decided to mock-up a combination of their concepts, which was a train set featuring a bunny driving a train through a farm (figure 15). Based on a concept suggested by Patrick, an 11-year-old boy taking part in the co-design workshop, the multi-stakeholder group decided to mock-up a robot with exchangeable limbs and heads (figure 16) for their personas, which had a shared interest in building things, science, and fantasy. One of the design students within the group asked, “Would it be a neutral robot, or would it be just for boys?” Patrick responded, “I think it could be neutral gender,” and then gender did not come up in discussion again until it was time to evaluate how they perceived their design in relation to gender. When doing so, Henrike noticed that, while the arm James had constructed out of paper was angular and machine-like, seeming more masculine, the arm she had created using play dough was softer and more human-like, which seemed more feminine. This is an example of how collaboratively building a 3D mock-up can unintentionally evoke a design issue, which can contribute to the success of the design (Brandt, 2005). In this case, if it had remained as a sketch, or if James had constructed both arms, the overall

Ungendering Childhood— Analysis, Results and Discussion

39

design might have been perceived as more masculine. When the group concluded that their design still might be slightly “boyish,” they discussed that, in order to balance out the boyish qualities, they could include some dress-up type accessories.

4.2.6 Evaluating the Relationship Between Gender

and Toy Design

All of the participants were able to compare examples of existing gendered toys and discuss how different qualities of these toys contributed to implying which gender they are targeted towards with ease, but struggled somewhat to evaluate the relationship between their own designs and gender.

Not surprisingly, when comparing two existing gendered toys, all of the participants were able to easily distinguish which gender each was targeted towards. All of the groups thought that girls would play with the boys’ toy, and this would be socially accepted, but did not think it would be accepted if a boy were to play with the girls’ toy. James, a father whose son was also participating, said that when a girl plays with a boys’ toy, people may suggest that she play with a girls’ toy instead, but they probably would not make an issue of it; though they would be concerned about a boy playing with girls’ toys, worried that he would become “gender messed up.” Reflecting on why this is, another participant added that she thought it was due to the fact that “boys are raised to be strong and not show emotion.” A few participants across different groups expressed the opinion that boys’ toys could be gender-neutral if the girls’ toys didn’t exist. These viewpoints are consistant with findings from existing research (Cherney, 2003; Blakemore and Centers, 2005).

James explained, “if they didn’t sell [the girls’ toy] and they only sold [the boys’ toy], it would be gender-neutral, but somehow because they sell [the girls’ toy], it kind of pushes [the boys’ toy] for boys.” Amongst gendered and gender-neutral toys, it seems to be the toys marketed towards girls that stand out as different (figure 17). This trend was demonstrated during the Mikado game. When the two groups that discussed the color-coding of the Mikado sticks concluded that the colors were

40

Ungendering Childhood— Analysis, Results and Discussion

Figure 16 Mock-up of reconfigurable robot concept

oys T y l r i G

not Girly Toys

Figure 17—A visualization representing the divide between “girls’ toys” and all other types of toys.

related to gender, it was the fact that the feminine themes were all orange that tipped them off to this scheme, having greater difficulty determining the meaning of the sticks with masculine and gender-neutral themes.

When the participants were tasked with using the reflective mapping gender tool to evaluate the relationship between various qualities of their designs and gender (writing the

qualities around a circular spectrum labeled with ‘boyish,’ ‘girlish,’ ‘both,’ and ‘neither’), there was some discussion regarding whether or not these qualities related to gender at all, and across all three groups, there was some confusion over the distinction between ‘both’ and ‘neither,’ both of which were often referred to as “gender-neutral.” Though, combining attributes that are stereotypically male with attributes that are stereotypically female in a design is a

Ungendering Childhood— Analysis, Results and Discussion

41

distinctly different strategy than avoiding gender stereotypes all together. Figure 18 shows the placement of qualities on the circular spectrum and where they pointed the arrow that represents their designs’ overall gender for the three groups who used the mapping tool. Though one group placed their “gender-neutral” color scheme near ‘both,’ another group with a similar color scheme placed “color” near ‘neither.’

Some examples of how different qualities and toys might fall on the spectrum might have helped the participants in discussing the gender of their designs and placing their designs’ qualities on the spectrum. For example, a color scheme of primary colors or browns and greens may fall under ‘neither,’ since those colors aren’t particularly masculine or feminine, but a color scheme that includes both pink and blue might fall under ‘both,’ since it incorporates both masculine and feminine colors. Also, general qualities that may fall under ‘both’ could potentially be split into more specific ones. For example, one group placed “shape” near both, but another group divided this quality into two distinctly different ones: “machine shapes,” which they placed between ‘both’ and ‘boyish,’ and “anthropomorphic shapes,’ which they placed between ‘both’ and ‘girlish.’

Though Blakemore and Centers (2005) did a quantitative study on the characteristics of gendered toys using surveys, the purpose of this gender-mapping tool was more qualitative, focusing on encouraging discussion and reflection, and as it was used in the workshops, the emphasis was on ungendering rather than gendering. It also differs in that, while in their study, they asked participants to rate toys by the gender, and then asked participants to evaluate individual qualities,

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Ungendering Childhood— Analysis, Results and Discussion

when using the gender-mapping tool, I asked participants to do the opposite. During one of the workshops, a participant questioned whether he should only consider the number of qualities in determining the toy’s overall gender, or if he could weigh certain qualities as more value. In addition to providing examples of how various concepts might be placed on the spectrum, including a specific selection of qualities and a system to weigh the values of the qualities, as Blackmore and Centers (2005) did in their study, may have helped lead to deeper and less confused reflection.

4.2.7 The Design Materials as Activism

Thorpe (2008) has defined four criteria for design activism based on an understanding of traditional activism and existing concepts of design as activism: (1) “It publicly reveals or frames a problem or challenging issue,” (2) “It makes a contentious claim for change,” (3) “It works on behalf of a neglected excluded or disadvantaged group,” and (4) “It disrupts routine practices, or systems of authority, which gives it the characteristic of being unconventional or unorthodox—outside traditional channels of change.”

Comparing the reflective design materials developed during this thesis against these criteria, the persona toolkit is the only one that might meet all four. It reveals the differences between toys targeted towards boys and girls and challenges participants to work together towards conceptualizing designs to change this, working on behalf of activists fighting against the interests of toy companies, who are at a disadvantage. It is disruptive in that it forces participants to deal with the issue head on and hands on. The task of building a 3D mock-up of the toy out of simple child-like materials could be thought

imagination

Both

girlish

Train

anthropomorphic shapes

Boyish

machine shapes violent skeleton kayak surviving hunting

style, colors shape customizable free play animals

battle accessories

Figure 18 A visualization charting where the 3 workshop groups placed qualities on the gender mapping tool when evaluating their toy designs.

Soft fluffy animals family taking care of animals

n eit h e r physical props different textures color programability reconfigurability

Journey to the center of the world Farm train set with rabbit character Customizable/ reconfigurable robot

Ungendering Childhood— Analysis, Results and Discussion

43

of as rapid prototyping with a kindergarten approach to learning, as described by Resnick (2007), involving reflection and exploration, which according to Hauser et al. (2013), are factors that lead to activism. While the Mikado game and gender-mapping tool do not fit Thorpe’s (2008) criteria for design activism, they were added at the suggestion of Interaction Design students who tested the toolkit activities and support the toolkit by warming participants up with selfreflection on the overall topic before framing the issue and asking them to reflect on the hands on design activity.

4.3 Classifying Types of Gender-Neutral Toy Design

Genderless toy: a toy that does not have any qualities that are strongly associated with either masculinity or femininity.

Another way a toy might be classified as gender-neutral is as demonstrated by the strategy of combining masculine and feminine traits in a design. For this type of toy, I propose the word ‘androgynous,’ meaning ‘having both male and female traits:’ Androgynous toy: a toy with relatively equal amounts stereotypically masculine and feminine qualities, combined in a way that would appeal to both boys and girls.

When considering how to understand, evaluate, and design gender-neutral toys, it may be helpful to designate different terms to describe the ways in which toys might be perceived as being gender-neutral. Based on my research and the existing use of gender-related terminology, I propose uses for the terms androgynous, genderless, and gender-ambiguous, which could aid in describing and designing gender-neutral toys. If gendered toys are understood as toys where the majority of their qualities are associated with stereotypes of one gender, how might gender-neutral toys be understood?

This concept for gender-neutral toy design is interesting, as it does not necessarily exclude skills taught through stereotypically gendered toys or interests children may have that are associated with gender.

A toy could be gender-neutral as demonstrated by the strategy of avoiding all gender stereotypes in a design. For this type of toy, I propose the use of the word ‘genderless,’ meaning ‘without gender:’

Hints of this concept were demonstrated through uncertainty and disagreement over the gendering of certain qualities and uncertainty and disagreement in determining the genders of personas. This concept could perhaps be applied using critical design as design activism (Marttila, 2012) to design critical activist toys.

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Ungendering Childhood— Analysis, Results and Discussion

It might also be possible for a toy to be gender-neutral through ambiguity, meaning it could be seen as either.

Gender-Ambiguous toy: a toy that can be perceived as being either masculine or feminine and may raise debate over which gender it is most aligned with.

5. Conclusions This thesis presented the process of collaboratively designing reflective design materials as activism against the gendering of children’s toys, as well as their implementation in design workshops. The effectiveness of the materials has been discussed in terms of initiating reflection, engaging participants, and design as activism; and the uses for the terms androgynous, genderless, and gender-ambiguous as different types of genderneutral toys have been proposed. Though this thesis draws conclusions on designing toys for gender neutrality and the use of reflective design materials for activism, it is not without its shortcomings. The Let Toys Be Toys lesson toolkit that was developed during the collaborative process has not been tested with a class of children, and the design materials were only tested with a small sampling of stakeholders, while instead of involving professional designers who are currently working in the toy industry, design students stood-in in their place.

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5.1

Towards a Framework for Gender-Neutral Toy Design

When a designing a gender-neutral toy, it is important to consider how different qualities of toys are perceived as relating to gender, and depending on what the designers of a gender-neutral toy are trying to achieve with their design, androgyny, genderless-ness, or gender-ambiguity may be possible design goals. The concepts of genderless toys, which exclude gender stereotypes, androgynous toys, which strike balance between genders, and gender-ambiguous toys, which make people question its relationship to gender, could be further explored and compared. With further research, this may become the beginnings of a framework for gender-neutral toy design.

5.2

Suggestions for Using Reflective Design Materials as Activism

As a conclusion to this research, I suggestion the following for the design and use of design materials for the purpose of design activism: • Involve a variety of stakeholders during the process of generating the reflective design materials and take advantage of opportunities to treat the process itself as activism.

• Ease participants into the topic by evoking self-reflection before framing the issue when using reflective design materials • Take an active role in facilitation and continuously probe for reflection, but try to avoid questioning or commenting on abrupt changes of opinion.

• Know what kind of reflection you want to provoke and, as a facilitator, have prepared responses to potential questions • Ask participants to deal with the issue head on and hands on.

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Ungendering Childhood— Conclusions

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