Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary ‘material turn’ and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern ‘invention’ of childhood—what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design—Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented – critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture. Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children’s use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Materializing the History of Childhood and Children Megan Brandow-Faller, City University of New York Kingsborough, USA Part I: Inventing the Material Child: Childhood, Consumption and Commodity Culture 1. Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys and Learning to Shop in 18th-Century Britain Serena Dyer, Middlesex University, UK 2. Transitional Pandoras: Dolls in the Long 18th-Century Ariane Fennetaux, University of Paris, Diderot, France 3. The (Play)things of Childhood: Mass Consumption and Its Critics in Belle Epoque France Sarah Curtis, San Francisco State University, USA 4. Building Kids: LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity Colin Fanning, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA Part II: Child’s Play? Avant-Garde and Reform Toy Design 5. Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking: Walter Crane, Flora's Feast, and the Possibilities of Children's Literature Andrea Korda, University of Alberta, Augustana, Canada 6. The Unexpected Victory of Charakter-Puppen: Dolls, Artists, Aesthetics and Identity in Early 20th-Century Germany Bryan Ganaway, The College of Charleston, USA 7. Work Becomes Play: Toy Design, Creative Play and Unlearning in the Bauhaus Legacy Michelle Millar Fisher, City University of New York, USA 8. Simply Child’s Play? Toys, Idealogy,and the Avant-Garde in Socialist Czechoslovakia before 1968 Cathleen Giustino, Auburn University, USA 9. Reconstructing Domestic Play: The Kaleidoscope House Karen Stock, Winthrop University, USA and Katherine Wheeler, University of Miami, USA Part III: Toys, Play and Design Culture as Instruments of Political and Ideological Indoctrination 10. Material Culture in Miniature: Nuremberg Kitchens as Inspirational Toys in the Long 19th Century James E. Bryan, University of Wisconsin-Stout, USA 11. Making Paper Models in 1860s New Zealand: An Exploration of Colonial Culture Through Child-Made Objects Lynette Townsend, Ministry for Culture and Heritage, New Zealand 12. Toys for Empire? Material Cultures of Children in Germany and German Southwest Africa, 1890 to 1918 Jakob Zollman, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, Germany 13. Public Nostalgia and the Infantilization of the Russian Peasant: Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys Marie Gasper-Hulvat, Kent State University at Stark, USA 14. The ‘Appropriate’ Plaything: Searching for the New Chinese Toy, 1910-1960s Valentina Boretti, University of London, UK Index