Brief: Create a toy that goes against the way that toys are categorized by ‘gender’.

Background: In the toy market, there is a clear divide between genders. For boys, the main theme of their toys play on aggression (soldiers, guns), while girls toys were more themed towards appearance (dolls, dress-up, makeup). During the 90’s, the emergence of a wider culture meant that marketing needed a shift to accommodate the masses. Instead of appealing to parents, they would directly appeal to children, and separately, boys and girls. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like it would cause any harm. But it is the deeper meaning of the subject matter that will ultimately mold the next generation. It reinforces antiquated stereotypes of what society expects us to be. Men are expected to be skilled and ambitions and industrial, while women are domesticated to the kitchen and and the mirror. We are telling boys that it is not okay to be concerned with their appearance and their character while telling girls they should be concerned with chores and their appearance.

To help determine the direction of the project, I made a mood board for what I was inspired by. I drew a lot from my own experiences playing video games like The Sims and Evil Genius which involves a lot of spatial orientation. In the toy market, spatial reasoning toy are usually considered boys toys. Girls toys are more about playing pretend and telling a story. So I initially wanted to make a spatial reasoning toy for girls, but as I kept searching I realized that Dollhouses deal with partial spatial reasoning, but it was also a great way to make boys play like girls played.

I also made a style mood board after I knew I wanted to make a dollhouse for boys. My idea was that boys value characters like Iron Man and GI Joe, so what if I made a dollhouse version of Iron Man’s house?

The next step was to make the dollhouse fun and interesting to boys. I almost wanted it to be a spy’s secret mansion/safe house. Another video game I drew from was Grand Theft Auto V. I knew that cars were another big part of boys toys, so I wanted to make a garage that was a giant spinning display for a bunch of cars, including a car elevator that can drop the car off on the driveway. The house also included an armory and a secret layer to display hero memorabilia. Both of these had secret entrances. The overall aesthetics were important as well because if it looked too ‘feminine’ then parents might have preconceived notions as to what their kids should be learning. For this reason I chose a modern aesthetic for the house overall.

After drawing the house orthographically and placing the rooms, a more complete picture was needed.I also took the opportunity to explore material and finish. I thought wood and neutral colored paint would make a more ambiguous dollhouse. From this drawing, I eliminated extraneous things like the guest bedroom and bathrooms.

I still wanted to keep the spatial reasoning aspect of the toy and that led me to making them separate pieces, without a ‘roof’, so that it would break the traditional dollhouse differently from just slicing a house in half. I wanted the furniture to be just as important as the action figure to allow for a more domestic play pattern for boys. It’s antithetical to assume that boys shouldn’t learn about being domestic simply because residing in a home requires domesticity.

These drawings helped me conceptualize exactly how the secret entrances to different rooms would play out. It also helped me determine the real life scale this dollhouse would be. And with this level of detail, it helped to capture the entire experience of playing with this dollhouse.