MANTA Extended — NICHOLAS YUAN

MANTA

2021
Senior Thesis
Manta is a toy that creates a fun cleaning experience for young children.
By refocusing their understanding of cleaning from a domestic chore to play, the intention is to preserve their freedom from gender typed behaviours.

CONCEPTUALIZATION

Manta began as a toy truck and turned into an investigation into how something as simple as a toy could subvert centuries of gender norms. How can a toy help a child learn about cleaning yet transcend itself as an object of play? To dissect my thoughts, I constructed a mind map to chart how these topic were related, the subtopics I was interested in, and the holes in my knowledge. This helped guide my initial research.
Eventually I arrived at the notion that by refocusing children’s understanding of cleaning from a domestic chore to play, we can preserve their freedom from gender typed behaviours. In this re-contextualization, the child’s excitement, fun and play time occupies their association of cleaning as an activity, thereby empowering their parents to teach them about domestic labor from an equitable perspective.

RESEARCH

My research into this topic started with researching the broader problem I wanted to tackle: gender inequality in the home. The systemic oppression of women is less so something to prove, but something I needed to contextualize and specificize for this project. Under the hegemonic paradigm of traditional gender norms, the portion of domestic labor women are expected to undertake include the organization and preparation of food, cleaning, laundry, and childcare amongst other things.

IDEATION TO DEVELOPMENT

During my early interviews with parents, I learned that children have limited cleaning capabilities. With this in mind, I started with simple cleaning objects like sponges, vacuums, and cleaning cloths. I began to transform them into unique, fun, and cute forms that might appeal to children. These interviews I had with parents were concurrent with my ideation phase so as I ideated, I quickly learned that things like vaccuums would be unfeasible as they weere inconvenient to parents, as they would be loud and irritating, and things like animals were very popular with kids because it’s a part of almost every child’s education at those ages.

I took the most interesting ideas from the areas that the parents suggested and modeled them in clay to get a rough idea of the look and feel of the toys. In doing this, and further exploring the details of the each design, I landed on three variations of a squishy sponge toy in the form of animals. I picked the manta ray, starfish, and the octopus to further develop in more drawings and modeling.

IDEATION TO DEVELOPMENT

PRELIMINARY TESTING

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic affecting New York fairly severely during my thesis, finding willing parents to participate in testing was difficult. As such, I opted for an alternative approach, finding parents/children through my own network. For preliminary testing I was able to get a hold of 3 children and was able to get videos of them playing with the toys. This allowed me to observe how they interacted with it so that I could focus on things like ergonomics, the features they found interesting, any safety concerns, and any other behavioural patterns that could inform the development of the project.

Noah is a 4 year old boy from Boston.
His initial reactions to the toys were mildly enthusiastic but as he spent more time with them, he developed an interest in the manta ray. Without prior instruction, he gravitated towards using it as something to scrub with. He shows interest in the floppiness of the toy and also in combining its play with another toy. Mainly, though, he shows a vivid interest in swinging the toy around by the rope.

Ella is a 2 year old girl from Florida. She took an initial interest in the octopus but eventually said the manta ray was her favorite. She showed great interest in swinging the toy by the rope but also, she wrapped the rope around her neck which was a slight concern. She also instinctively used the rope to connect the two toys which was interesting. Overall, the manta ray elicited a high level of interest from this age group but it seemed like its function as a cleaning object was not clear.

Moby and Bowie are two boys from Idaho. Their mother gave them prior instruction as to how to use the toys as cleaning objects so I got a glimpse of how they would clean with it. Bowie did the majority of the cleaning with the manta ray and moby was less focused. Bowie’s grip on the manta toy was a scrunch grip, indicating that there was a degree of difficulty in gripping it for him. Like Noah, he seemed to understand how to use it as a cleaning object, as seen in the entirety of the video. It is to be noted that they were using the toys wet.

PARENT FEEDBACK

Overall, the feedback I received from the parents was very positive. They all saw a need for a product like mine amongst the toys that they already have for their children and some even said that they would buy it if it existed right now. There were some concerns, mainly safety concerns about the tail - which I had spotted when analyzing the videos - and hygiene concerns, as it wasn’t clear to parents how to get the sponge out to clean. I noted these moving forward in my design development and tried to tackle them as priorities.

DESIGN REFINEMENT

Based on the feedback given to me by the families, I sketched out and developed various ideas to integrate their needs. I also refined the form and functional details. Key takeaways from the feedback included that the rope may have been too long, the toy’s dynamic shape was successful, and that there seemed to be in all of the children some sense of how to use it. I also modelled using paper, clay, cardboard, and eventually fabric to figure out the next iteration of my design. This helped me solidfy the manufacturing process of the toy as well as the details that would need to be changed for this iteration.

As seen below, the main changes incorporated into this iteration was a shorter rope, a broader, more realistic shape, as well as a pocket for sponge replacement and for the child’s hand. After this stage, I sent it off for more testing.

FURTHER TESTING

After deciding on this iteration, I made models to send out to the children from my previous round of testing to observe if any of the changes made were effective, and to look for more room for improvements and changes.

In the second round of testing with Noah, he engaged with the manta ray pretty similarly as he did the first time. He gravitated towards and enjoyed playing with the tail of the toy, swinging it and wrapping it around things. He also responded positively to the pocket, as he intuitively reached for it as an area to grip and also explored different ways he could put his hand in it. However, when he put his hand in the toy as I intended, it was a little bit too big.

In the second round of testing with Ella, she took a much greater interest in the manta ray, making observations about its color and shape as well as exploring the pocket very intuitively with her hands. She engaged more with the tail of the toy this time, picking the toy up by the tail initially and swinging it like Noah. She was also able to use the pocket pretty intuitively, though it did look a little big on her hand. She seemed to really enjoy the toy as we called, even having difficulty sharing it with her sister.

This time when i sent the toy to Ella and her family, her sister, Emmy had a chance to play with the toy too, however, her interactions with the toy were minimal, She had slight difficulty grabbing the toy at first, opting to grip the fabric of the pocket. She then took was interested in the tail for a little bit, before rubbing the toy on her face. The face rubbing element is interesting as it implies she could have possibly found similarities in the function of the object as a cloth in the way of a napkin or face towel rubbing her face, while her interaction with the tail shows that interest in it spans all ages.

PACKAGING

While finalizing the design of the toy and fabricating my final model, I also worked on packaging and branding. I looked to existing creative forms of packaging for inspiration. I wanted to design something that was simple, low waste, and yet still interesting and fun. I also wanted to design with the constraints of using recycled cardboard as a primary material.

MATERIALS

As part of my focus on sustainability for this project, I was very selective when choosing materials. I also had to take into consideration materials that are child friendly, as safety is a big priority with parents. Naturally, the solution to this was selecting organic materials or materials that have as little processing as possible, so that the product can be easily biodegradable, recyclable, or even compostable.

For the interior material of the toy, I decided sampled a few options but ultimately landed on a material I had found early on that was incredibly environmentally friendly, but also absorbent and hard upon drying. Its rigidity while dry compared to while wet gives it a dynamic materiality for the children to observe and adds a dimension to the product. As seen below, it also is highly absorbent, quick to dry, and easily manufacturable.

For the exterior material of the toy, I mainly looked to infant garments for inspiration, where I landed on organic cotton or hemp being the safest, and most environmentally friendly option. From there, it was a matter of thicknes, softness, absorbency, and sewability so I sampled various different weaves of cotton to find the right one.

PROCESS TREE

To track the environmental and possible ethical impacts of the production of my toy, I created a process tree. I broke the toy down into materials and broke those materials down into exactly what resources are used to process, manufacture, and source them. This was crucial in understanding and showing how a more environmentally sustainable product could be made in today’s toy market.