“How can you not have insurance?”
“Because I spent my money on the Clapco D29, the most impenetrable lock on the market today. It has only one design flaw, the door must be closed!”
Inside Playskool’s toy testing lab
Alpha Mummy visited the FunLab at Hasbro headquarters in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to see how fun is invented
In the middle of a room inside an unobtrusive office block in Rhode Island, Kota the dinousaur is munching the hand of a three-year-old, while another girl scrambles onto its back. A few feet away, several small children load up a basket with plastic food in the miniature kitchen. Across the room some boys are playing with a prototype toy that the journalists in the room are told they cannot look at, report on or, one might say, even think about it. Welcome to the Playskool FunLab. These are its scientists.
Up to five or six times a day children of all ages, ranging from two months to tweenager, visit the FunLab, to try out new toys, test upgrades and vet the latest versions of the old favourites.
“Toy tester” sounds like a job dreamed up for a Tom Hanks movie, but in truth these children tinkering on the splodges of primary-coloured carpet are the end-of-the-line “workers” that help make Playskool toys fun. They push buttons, they twiddle knobs, and it’s not all just fun and games.
“If something needs to be pressed down on it, what is the force that a child needs to push down on it to get it to activate?” says Deb Rocchio, who oversees the FunLab, sometimes hosting up to six sessions a day. She has the appearance of someone who wrangles children for a living – hair drawn up in a ponytail, comfortable clothes, trainers. “We could have a product that needs to be sized appropriately for a specific age group. We also evaluate how a child plays with a product, play patterns for instance – does it need all those bells and whistles on it,” she says.
The room is divided into regions – a table for rolling out Play Doh, an area populated with dollies, there’s even an area stocked with a competitor’s play kitchen to see if what the other guys are cooking up more fun than Playskool.
Deb and her team play with the children in the room. And behind the one-way glass, marketers and engineers and executives watch from a darkened control room.
Parents can stay in the room or retire to a lounge, and they’re part of the process as well. "They give us the pros and cons. They understand that just because they’re coming to Hasbro doesn’t mean they have to be completely positive about things," says Rocchio.
Standing to one side of the Playlab, Wayne Luther, senior vice president of Playskool design, describes the inspiration process for the toys. “We might be out on the weekend and see a child do something that inspires us,” says Luther, an industrial designer who could have been drafted in from Central Casting, with his chic eyeglasses and lanky frame. Or “we may say we need a new infant toy line that addresses a little more activity and motion and physical movement than we have right now. How do we do that?”
Toy designers have an eye on child development as closely as any health visitor or parenting book author, if with slightly different motivations. “[Children] are more alert when [they’re] moving. Young children are going to learn better when they’re moving around rather than sitting still. Because these days, we don’t just want our children’s toys to be fun. We want them to train hand-eye coordination, gross motor skills, eye tracking."
If working for a toy company is something enjoyed by the youngest of children, it isn’t wasted on the grown-ups either. Every cubicle in the sprawling building has a shelf cluttered with action figures, Mr Potato Heads and big-eyed puppies. Next to the reception desk, a collection of My Little Ponies is glued onto a pillar, trotting up to the ceiling. The corridor leading back to offices and meeting rooms is lined with cases of vintage toys – old-fashioned Lincoln Logs built into a fort, a Swarovsky-crystal encrusted Mr and Mrs Potato Head, a vintage Monopoly game with the board drawn on a square of fabric.
To be sure, making toys is a business, and Hasbro’s business includes Transformers, Play Doh, Littlest Pet Shop and Scrabble. While last year its earnings dropped to $306.8 million, its share price rose 14 per cent. In 2007 it recorded record net earnings of $333 million, more than a $100 million increase from 2006. Its Transformers business generated $480 million in revenue in 2007 and its Littlest Pet Shop was a big earner for the company in 2008. Playskool, which produces toys for the younger children, celebrated its 80th anniversary last year.
A big criticism of some toys made by Hasbro and other companies these days is that while they may engage little hands and eyes with their buzzings, blippings and machinations, they fail to gain traction with little imaginations. It’s not like back in the good ol days when we were satisfied with mammoth bones and the first wheel.
“Like anything electronics can be done well or they can be done poorly,” says Luther. “The purpose of it isn’t to be technological. it’s to provide an experience for the child they didn’t have before." It’s hard to argue with the appeal of something like Helmet Heroes, a helmet children wear that employs simple virtual reality and a steering wheel or handlebars, so kids get the lights and sounds of driving while they run around the sitting room.
And just like children turn cardboard boxes into castles or transform a stick into a sword, they find unexpected ways to engage with toys themselves that surprise the experts and parents. The Playskool Busy Ball Popper is recommended for babies nine to 24 months old, but in the FunLab I watched a 9-year-old and 4-year-old happily play with one together for half an hour. The toy uses air to push balls up and out of a cylinder into a curved ball run that channels them back into the main unit and up the cylinder again. The two boys took turns putting their hands over the air flow to halt the balls, seeing how high up they could make them jump then racing each other grab them as they rolled away across the floor.
As Luther describes it, that’s part of the science of toy building. What parents might see as an annoying problem (the balls frequently pop out), he describes as part of the play process – the balls go everywhere and the kids gallop around chasing them then race back to start again.
The inventiveness is part of the fun. Rocchio says, "We find that every single day. The joy of coming to work every day is they teach us something new."
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What if a feedback from the lab shows kids don’t like the main thing the toy was supposed to do? "That happens," he says. "It’s only frustrating if we haven’t tested the toy early enough to react to that."
Creating a toy takes about two and a half years, running from conception to prototypes, testing, manufacture, marketing and finally shop shelves.
"We’re in here very early with prototypes and red boards and concepts. And if we think the main purpose is one thing and the child really enjoys something else, we’re early enough to respond."
It’s the end of the play session during our visit. This one went on an hour and a half, but for the smallest children they can last as short as 15 minutes. The children take off the oversized t-shirts with nametags affixed that indicate they’re tester for a day, that they’ve slipped over their regular clothes. They stand iline up by the door as they’re handed a small goody bag and the helpers thank them for coming to play. Some look dazed as they’re led out by a parent. Testing toys is hard work.
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