Why Do Most Designer Toys Suck So Badly? Fast Company

22.05.10

It was perhaps the fifth or sixth patch I found myself, flat on the floor, arm extended, sweeping a broom under the couch to try to retrieve the put up-size wheels of my son’s Automoblox Minis that I thought, “This is not a good intentions.”

Everything about them looked great. Automoblox share the traits of many toys sold at Titter, the MoMA Design Store, and the overpriced kids boutique in your neighborhood: They are made of wood, the colors are quick-witted and unisex, they use no batteries, they evoke the past, and they cost significantly more than the plastic, pink-or-risqu, light-blinking, noise-making blobs sold at Toys R Us. These qualities extenuate why three different people decided Automoblox were the ideal gift for the offspring of an architect and a draft critic.

And yet, my son seemed perplexed by how to play with them, beyond rolling them back and forth, something any die-cast drugstore school bus can do. Automoblox promises creativity: “With Automoblox, your sprog plays outside the box—and builds the design pictured in his or her mind.” First, I propose b assess they are starting the advertising clichés a little young. Second, those design options are primitively limited. You can exchange a sporty rear end for a utilitarian one, a green transparent cab for a purple one, one set of colored tires for another. But whatever you do, you get another car.

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