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Description
Children's toys are marketed to our youngest and most vulnerable consumers, yet few parents are aware of the powerful messages toys project about personal identity and gender. My project addresses concerns about the increasingly gender-polarized design and marketing of children's toys—a trend that is currently saturating mainstream toy stores with an overabundance of hyper-masculine toys on one side of the store and hyper-feminine ones on the other. Toy branding uses two distinct visual languages to clearly distinguish boy and girl toys as contrasting objects that are not meant to be intermixed. Children learn from very early ages which area of the store is designated for them. Not only are design elements such as color and typography used in polarizing ways to indicate the intended gender, but children are presented with two extremely opposing play narratives—adventure and violence for boys versus fashion and caretaking for girls. It has been argued that these are "natural" play preferences between boys and girls, but there is equal evidence that children's understanding of gender roles is highly influenced by the ways these behaviors are encouraged or discouraged. Today's toy market primarily offers play options that reinforce stereotypical and gender-segregated themes and fails to represent modern advances in gender equality. The Toy A/Isles exposes visitors to the underlying social implications of gender-dichotomized children's toys by means of the narrative of a fictional land of toys in an interactive gallery experience. As a graphic designer, I am concerned with the role my profession plays in developing gender-polarized branding that supports this current trend and committed to using graphic design instead as a tool to raise awareness and incite change. Graphic design is a powerful instrument for presenting complex social issues to audiences in accessible ways. This project transforms data collected from toy stores, advertisements, websites, and toy packaging, into narrative panels that both reveal the toy industry's overtly sexist messages and proposes opportunities to resist them. With this information I hope to inspire parents to examine their current consumption patterns, engage in conversations with their children about gender equality, and demand wider and less gender-stereotypical options from toy manufacturers. This project also challenges graphic design professionals to consider the social implications of the products their skills are helping to promote. Through my work, I am both questioning the power of graphic design in shaping this cultural phenomenon of gender divided toys and using graphic design as a tool to spark parents' interest on the topic since they (and their children) have the voices toy companies care about. The Toy A/Isles thesis exhibition, held at the Everett Gee Jackson Gallery at San Diego State University on April 20-25, 2013, offered visitors an opportunity to experience an interpretation of the gender-divided toy market.
