[Cas Holman] When I design toys, I want children to create
from their imaginations rather than following instructions.
If I were to give kids a set of parts
-and tell them to build a car... -[engine revving]
...there would be a right and a wrong answer.
They already have an understanding and archetype of what a car is.
It's a finished idea.
On the other hand, if I give them the parts and pieces and say,
"Build a way to get to school,"
then there's room for many ideas.
And they could make a sidewalk, or a rocket launcher,
or a bird saddle.
My work as a designer is to give them these tools,
so that they are free to imagine, explore ideas, and invent new things.
[theme music playing]
[machine whirring and grinding]
[Cas] I wouldn't say that I design toys per se.
There's a connotation with the word "toy," which is kind of frivolous.
And so I say that I design for play.
Which is kind of weird because it sounds like I'm saying "designing foreplay."
So, it's not a perfect title...
but it's different than designing play, right?
We don't design the play,
we design for the circumstances of play to arise.
I have a hard time distinguishing play from design.
In a way, a lot of what we do in design is play.
Testing things out as ideas, as concepts,
but also as objects in space, we’ll play with things.
I like to start with kind of an experiential goal
and then design the object or the system or the playground or whatever it is,
design that around it.
I've been working on something called The Critter,
which is in the early phases.
I saw an old pommel horse
and they're so beautiful
and they're such an interesting kind of abstraction of a horse.
And I remembered that I loved playing on that.
And then I started looking more at ride-on toys,
so some other old ones
that you might crank to make it move forward.
And just kind of some simple versions.
The Critter has holes in it and things plug in,
so if they want it to have wheels, it can have wheels.
If they want it to have a rocker,
it can have rocking legs that would plug in.
And then whatever other kinds of, maybe, feet
or things that spin.
So, it can be a creature or a vehicle
or an invention of their own, hopefully.
[man] All along the roofline in her studio are sketch after sketch after sketch
that are stapled, taped, pinned.
Every time I go, there's different sketches
and, you know, the next thing she's thinking about.
[Cas] I think of sketching as an extension of my brain.
Like, I have an idea and can't really figure it out
until my hand is helping. So, sometimes I have an idea
of what it is in my head, but it's usually not finished until I get it on paper.
I don't find words as useful as images.
So, in communicating it to other people,
I always manage to come at things from a completely different direction.
So, when I worked for a bigger design firm,
I would get called in to meetings to be the wildcard.
[man] Cas is a designer,
but she's, like, kind of off the normal professional way.
She's like a kid
and so happy and excited about stuff
that it makes everything that she's doing fun.
[Cas] When I was working with Rockwell Group,
David Rockwell had started the momentum of a kind of a pet project of his interest
of reinventing the playground.
I wound up on that project, which was a dream.
When I was first put on that project,
I was just sketching different forms of playground.
How can we make a playground look different?
Beautiful sculptural things and different ways of holding up a slide.
But I could tell it looked different, but the play was the same.
So, I started doing this thing. I would draw a child
in different positions
and then sketch a way to get them there.
So, the slide is adrenaline and quick, uncontrolled movement.
How else can I facilitate that?
Ultimately, the design of the...
Now, they're kind of called the Big Blue Blocks.
They're based on the Caroline Pratt Unit Blocks,
the most basic modular building blocks. They're just giant.
And we designed a way for children to build and create
a playground that would change and evolve throughout the day.
So, the Big Blue Blocks came out of
the idea of an ever-evolving playground that's designed by children.
[woman] We tend to downplay play, as if it's...
that frivolous, joyful thing that children do, but it's really their world.
It's like the water that they swim in.
And so free play, where there's not a right or wrong answer,
gives them this sense of "I can do it, I can think for myself."
In psychology, we call it agency or, you know, confidence.
But it's that idea that the child really feels like,
"Hey, I had an idea, and I did it."
And that then spurs on learning.
[Cas] I remember as a kid,
I began to learn that our constructed environments
were places that enforced certain hierarchies and power structures
that were not friendly to everybody, particularly children.
And I have a few really specific memories
of being so mad about the height of sinks.
[laughs]
The height of sinks I just thought made no sense.
I was aware that they were not designed for me.
I just knew this is totally stupid and adults are ridiculous
and these sinks are such a stupid height.
You know, 'cause I was like, "An adult could use a low sink,
but children can't use a high sink.
Like, this isn't a hard problem to solve, people. Come on, get with it."
I want my designs to speak to the weirdos. Like, I don't know how else to say it.
But I want them to be tools for children to feel understood.
My first product was called Geemo.
At the time, I was looking at a lot of different patterns in nature,
and with Geemo, specifically bone marrow.
And so I was thinking about how one unit can make an irregular pattern.
Geemo is on a three-pointed grid, but the center is off.
Like, I scooted the center a little bit.
And so I made a whole series of different parts and pieces with limbs,
figuring something out where it would join and become all one piece.
And then the magnetic ends,
that was very specific to it becoming a more open-ended toy
because I thought about making them different colors,
that positive might be one color
and negative might be another, so they match up.
But there's something, I think, wonderful about
when the magnets don't meet.
And if it had the instructions built into it through color coding,
you would figure that out and then never do it wrong and never have that moment.
I worked with one company that was gonna bring it into production
and kind of at the last minute, they said,
"Okay, so what are the characters? What are the faces?"
And I was like, "Wait, what? What do you mean?"
And they were like, "Well, you know, obviously, the face."
And I just said, "Wait, what? How..."
Like, they had been making an assumption about...
that this wasn't finished, that I was going to put some kind of face on it.
And I was like, "Wait, no. No, that's not that... What?"
I decided not to work with them after that. [laughs]
People say, "Oh, well, does it... But kids like colors!"
And I'm like, "Kids are actually pretty sophisticated.
Like, they can play with a white toy
and appreciate that the color isn't telling them what it is."
It won an award.
So, it launched in the New York MoMA Design Store in 2006.
And...
I had a couple chances to license the idea to another company,
but I was... young,
naive, and arrogant.
So, I said, "I'll just... I want to do this myself." [laughs]
Which, trial by fire. I learned so much
and it took years and a lot of money.
And there were times that Geemo had a studio and a place to live,
but I did not.
The running of that part of the business,
it was all I was doing.
And I realized that,
you know, what I wanted to be doing was designing more toys.
My company is called Heroes Will Rise,
and I launched it in 2006.
Essentially, we tried to design it
such that there are...
In and of itself, it's modular for the manufacturing.
So this is a scale model just with foam core of this one.
-[man] Three and a half? -Three and a half.
[Cas] I no longer have to live on couches, which is nice.
I'm no longer doing it alone.
I have an incredible business manager named Doug Johnson,
who was a game-changer.
The motto and kind of the driving force is "easy is boring."
"Easy" meaning something that doesn't engage your thinking.
There's an assumption in the field of design
that easy is great, right?
"My God, I have to push three buttons, that's a problem.
I should just have to push one button."
And I'm not quite sure why that's a good thing.
When I was in Japan, I became familiar with this partnership,
Arakawa, he was an architect, and Madeline Gins, who was a poet.
And Arakawa and Gins had a kind of a thinking group
that was called Architecture Against Death.
And the core of their ideas was that
if life is predictable, you're a zombie.
So the Architecture Against Death was about, "Why do floors need to be flat?
What if you had to pay attention while you walk?"
You know, "Why do we have rectilinear corners?"
So the idea is that you should be aware and be paying attention,
and that's how you stay young and continue thinking.
I kind of, like, was poking around and realizing...
"Right, we kind of have, like... Toys are kind of crap."
They're plastic. They're, like... They're not... They're just...
They're... They're not something kids are getting something out of.
[doll] Mama!
[Cas] I started to feel like they were designed to keep kids occupied...
-[toy laughing] -...or they were designed to sell.
But they weren't really designed with children and play value in mind.
Lots of toys are very goal oriented.
They look like something,
there's one way to play with it.
So, you quickly figure out it can go this way or that way and then you're done.
So it sort of shuts down that building on their own
pleasure and engagement and enjoyment.
[Cas] You see Rigamajig being used by a group of kids
and you get it.
You have an emotional understanding of it.
Rigamajig is a kit of parts
that could be seen as a learning material.
It could be seen as a toy or a playground.
I think of it as a glorified pile of construction debris.
There are so many parts and pieces to it.
It has planks, nuts and bolts,
some corner brackets, hooks, and there's a pulley.
What I did in designing it, I wanted children to be able
to build without mastering a tool.
So, I wanted it to be
intuitive and usable for small hands.
I took the... kind of a wingnut,
and I took the wings off of the nut and put it on the bolt,
so the bolt and the nut can easily be screwed in
and actually get pretty tight without using any kind of tool.
And those are intentionally black.
They are meant to look like real hardware.
The boards are three-quarter-inch plywood.
They're heavy planks. You know, it's a very large, heavy piece of wood.
Children really often when they first encounter Rigamajig say, "This is real."
[children chatter excitedly]
You can see them kind of like, "Oh, okay," you know.
And they play with it differently, and they know that they can impact space
and that they can make something larger than themselves,
and being entrusted with real materials
is also hugely empowering for them.
[excited chatter]
[Cas] Originally, Rigamajig was part of a commission
by the Friends of The High Line in New York City.
It was the High Line Children's Workyard Kit.
And was just so successful,
and I got such great feedback, specifically from teachers,
saying, "This is wonderful. I want to use this in the classroom."
I tried to sell it to some other companies.
They were like, "This is too weird."
I started to bring it to the market on my own.
The first time I showed it, I was pretty discouraged.
The feedback was like, "Where does it even fit in?"
[Bruce] You know, it's really hard trying to put it into one of the boxes
in the industry, 'cause there's really nothing else out there like it.
I'd like to see a lot more of it, personally,
'cause things do seem too repetitive and prescribed.
Uh, and I think kids want the more open-ended,
and I think they need more open-ended.
You know, they get taught enough instructions.
[male voiceover] If we manufactured our children in a child factory,
they'd all be alike. Then we could teach them very easily.
[Cas] I've always been interested in, "How can school be different?
Why does school have to look like that?"
[male voiceover] Elementary schoolroom USA.
It's a wonderful part of the American scene.
It's commonplace, but important.
And it's quite the same whether it's in a big city,
average town, or country hamlet.
[school bell rings]
[Cas] The rows of desks, there's an expert at the front.
The assumption that, like, we're just an empty sponge
and the teacher is the vessel of knowledge.
"I'm gonna tell you a bunch of stuff,
and now it's in your brain and now you know it."
We're still using a model that was developed around industrialization.
It was developed to make factory workers.
I figured this out pretty early on that in school,
what I was being assessed on was how good at school I was.
And then we reinforce this with SATs and things like this.
But this is not a gauge of intelligence. It's a gauge of how well you take tests.
School was hard.
Like, when I saw my peers doing well, I just was like,
"All right, I guess they're just smarter than me."
And I think the things that I'm good at weren't celebrated
and they weren't seen as something that was smart.
And it just didn't make sense to me
that we were spending our childhood indoors. [chuckles]
Classroom should be about the world that's outside,
not its own weird tomb of archaic knowledge.
Working with design students and designing for children or early education,
it all starts to feel like it's all the same thing,
and I think that my teaching with undergraduate art students
is more influenced by
what I know and have understood about early education than vice versa.
[Cas] Uh... Let's start over here.
We're not critiquing a final piece.
We're testing, so I think it's up to the artist what...
Think about what you want to learn, right? Or what you're curious about.
Be strategic about what you tell us. Right?
[Cas] In the classroom, we play constantly.
So, the longest part is the cylinder that goes up,
and then this is the most confusing shape, 'cause I don't know the name for it.
It's like a cylinder has been carved into it.
-[man] Is this your object? -Hey!
[students laugh]
This is the object.
[laughter]
[Cas] My first year of teaching, I had the Introduction to Design students.
I had so much fun
designing these exercises and these assignments for them.
We were calling it Name By Function.
So instead of saying, "Let's all design a mug,"
it's like, “Design a way to transport water.”
So, you know, they'll have them sketch ten ways to transport water
not found in the kitchen. Okay, so there's a hose...
The really great thinkers will say, "Okay, you know, my hands cupped together
is a way of transporting water." "My mouth." "A sponge."
And then I'll say, "Okay, now sketch ten more."
It's a fun exercise to do with beginning design students
who thought that they were going to come to school and design shoes and cars.
And I'm like, "No! Let's have an existential crisis instead."
Growing up, we lived in the woods in Grass Valley, California,
near the Yuba River.
It's all just gorgeous, hot rocks.
I was almost always outside.
And so,
I think I understand, through my own experience,
the value and the joy and the importance of play.
And particularly of free play.
I was raised by a single parent.
My mom worked a lot.
So, I mostly played alone. I was what would be considered a latchkey kid,
but the house didn't have keys,
so that never fit.
People would say, "You're a latchkey kid." I was like, "No, I don't have a key."
Real literal about it.
And it's hard
when I think about her when somebody says, you know, "What did you do?
What was your play?" And I'm like, "Oh..."
That's... It was play, so it was noth... Like, I don't...
I don't know, I was outside doing, like...
Poking a dead thing with a stick.
Like... It's this... Climbing a tree. I don't know what I did up there,
but I was doing it for three hours. Like, that's also the point of play
is that there's not an outcome other than that it's intuitive.
[woman] I made a mark here about where ten was.
Ten yards.
So are you going to shoot after I shoot?
-[Cas] Yeah. -Good.
-[Cas] It's such a satisfying sound. -Okay. It is, isn't it?
[Gerri] I always wanted my kids to take their curiosity
just as far as it would go.
You know? So, I always encouraged that.
Wow.
I think I almost held the thing still at that point.
-Oh, good. -No finger...
[Gerri] When she was young,
our property had been cleared of a lot of manzanita,
but they'd never been really dug up,
so there's all these little manzanita stumps all over the yard.
And she would go out there barefoot, and she would always be hurting herself
and stubbing her toes. And so she told me
that I needed to go out there and clear the yard.
And I said, "Well, why don't you put on some shoes when you go out there?"
"I can't be bothered with shoes. I'm too busy playing."
So, that was her attitude. [laughs]
-Here's attitude right here. -[Cas laughs]
[Gerri] I didn't worry too much.
You know, we always made sure that when... before they jumped off a rock,
they knew they needed to check the depth of the water
and what they were jumping into type thing.
But as far as what their actual choices to do in that space,
I... I didn't really worry too much.
-This would be the mom section. -[Gerri laughs]
And this is the Cas section.
[Cas] I think that all humans play because we have to.
Increasingly, we're starting to understand
how much animals play, not just to learn.
We know that children and animals will play as a way of learning.
Bears play fight,
and that's kinda how they're learning to actually fight.
But they also play for enjoyment.
This is the beauty of YouTube. We can now watch videos of crows
using a yogurt lid to slide down a roof that has snow on it
and then climb back up and slide down again for no purpose other than play
and the enjoyment of the act.
Play is as essential as food, air, sleep,
whatever else we have to do to stay alive.
Play is therapy. It engages our brain,
it gets our body and our mind back in tune with each other.
As kids, we lose some of the inhibition that happens on a playground,
but it translates into different places in our lives, I think.
Moving our bodies around, whether it's in some kind of sport or exercise
or, for me, dance has more of a flow to it.
Dancing is more than part of my inspiration process.
I think dancing is part of my "being a sane human" process.
I enjoy dancing quite a bit, and I'm a very good breakdancer.
I came up with this persona when I was living in San Francisco,
a fellow named Electro, the Pop and Lock King.
And I was doing drag at a club called Tranny Shack.
And really amazing, active, creative performance art, drag scene.
In the meantime,
I was trying to pretend to be a person who could work in an office.
At the time, The Maury Povich Show was doing these pageants.
"Is it a man or a woman?" While the audience shouted,
"It's a man! It's a woman!"
She's a man, baby! Yeah!
[Cas] Which is so beyond messy now, and I kind...
I knew that at the time also, but I'd never been to New York.
And I said, "So... [chuckles]
...is it okay if I take this day off to fly to New York
to be on The Maury Povich Show?"
Flip to two months later when the show aired,
they shut down the entire office,
and we all piled into the conference room to watch it on TV.
So, Electro, come on out!
[dance music playing]
[crowd cheering]
[Cas] Which was... Well, it was mortifying.
But it was also amazing, because here were these people being super supportive
and embracing that side of me, which I thought
had previously been kind of secret.
Moments like that where I'd realize
I didn't have to separate my selves.
I think half of the reason that I liked performing
was making all of the costumes and the sets.
And I started doing more, like, "Why don't I do, like, Pegasus drag?
Or hot dog drag?" So, my costumes were getting more elaborate.
That a little bit fulfilled the creativity,
but I always had some version
of a studio where I was making other things on the side.
I was making furniture and these kind of... [laughs]
...elaborately fabricated cast epoxy toilet seats.
But they sold in galleries.
They were 400-dollar toilet seats.
But it was really important to me that people put them on their toilets.
That was the first thing that I considered putting into mass production.
And then I realized that epoxy goes nowhere.
It'll be here for so many thousands of years after I am dead.
We're burning through non-sustainable objects faster and faster.
So, I'm very careful about what I put into the world.
So, with Critter, the stage we are at now is
I'm starting to develop it and thinking about materials,
and have talked to a couple of different companies
about how they might want to develop and market it.
I imagine it'll be a combination of different materials:
wood and some kind of soft plush sorts of things,
as well as some probably rigid components.
And then for the plug-ins, or the doodads, as I've been calling them,
these are more of a sketch model.
They're just, like, whatever cardboard I had laying around,
um, hot glue and tape to hold things together.
So, really quick ways to figure out how they'll work.
Like, this can be both a robot claw and a foot and maybe a moon.
[Tovah] Any toy could be turned into a non-open-ended toy.
The way I see it working against the child is that it says to them,
"Either you do it right or you do it wrong."
If you feel like you're not good at something, you just retreat.
Children are curious. They want to engage with the world,
and you give them open-ended toys, they're much happier.
-[Cas] This is one-third scale model. -[Tovah] Right.
And this is a three-year-old.
[Cas] I'll take the prototype
and give it to kids,
teachers, parents, whoever would have some expertise,
and, of course, they always have really helpful input.
[Tovah] From a three-year-old's point of view--
-[Cas] I hadn't thought about that. -Well, you can peek in.
-Yeah. Yeah. -And children like to see or peek.
You know, "Are my things in there?" Plus, I can open it and peek.
[Cas] I didn't think about that, which could be really fun with color, right?
-If the things inside of it... -Are colored.
Like, somehow...
-Or if even the insides of the... -Even if...
That's what I was thinking. Or even if the inside of this has color.
-Yeah. -So they can...
Like, if this were...
Right. We could kind of color
-the insides of the... -Yeah.
[Tovah] When I saw it, I thought, "Mailbox or birdhouse?"
But the more we talked about it, the more I could see,
“Oh, there's so many possibilities with it."
It's that it says a child could take this and do whatever they want with it.
Says to the child, "Your ideas are really important." Right?
'Cause if you've created something
and it was your ideas and now you carried them out, then it's yours.
[Cas] Here's a child activist mobile.
[chuckles]
It's a megaphone.
[Cas] Design is kind of my tool for activism, in a way.
I find myself in big box stores.
There's, like, the pink aisle and the blue aisle. It's infuriating.
It makes no sense.
There are children who like pink and children who like blue.
Why we've assigned that to boys and girls is absurd.
It's just not how children... are, or it is how they wind up being,
because that's what... the options that they're given.
[male voiceover] Introducing the new GI Joe Adventure Team.
Five rugged men with lifelike hair.
She changed it ten times, and she wants it curly again.
-Better fix Ken a sandwich. -[both giggling]
[Cas] It's important to me to have some positive impact,
in particular, when I see things that I struggled with in childhood
that I don't think were necessary.
I probably started having an awareness of gender,
it was maybe around third grade.
I knew that, you know, there were boys and girls and I was a girl.
But there was a point at which I was meant to stop...
To start... Well, stop being a tomboy.
Simultaneously, my dad was not happy with me
not growing out of a tomboy.
And he was in charge of a lot of the back-to-school shopping.
He caught me sneaking over into the boys' section to get the clothes
to bring them into the girls' section. I thought he wouldn't figure that out.
And then he just was not going to buy me clothes.
I needed to get over it. I needed to grow up.
And so that was the first time that I realized it was going to be an issue.
Then I started, I think, noticing in other places
where men and women were treated differently
and that the expectations were starting to get really inconvenient.
It felt like there was a set of rules that
if the other girls didn't follow, those wouldn't be expected of me.
So, I was, like, a little bit mad and disappointed
at them for following the rules of wearing dresses
and screaming when you see a worm.
But I think it's always been a huge presence.
It's a lens through which I have no choice but to see the world.
[female interviewer] And did your dad, like... What happened there?
No, he never came around. He's still mad.
[laughing]
No. It's, um... I mean, if only that were our only issue.
I think...
the fact that I'm a feminist and my gender is a bigger issue for him
than the fact that I'm queer.
I... [stammers]
...don't need to psychoanalyze him, but we don't talk.
We haven't... We periodically would go
a year, a couple years without speaking...
Um, but I was recently officially disowned.
At this point, we're, like, going on 25 years of therapy.
So, I can live without a relationship that just makes me feel crappy.
[Cas] I didn't know that Alesdair was...
something that I could have, let alone even want to have.
I understood vaguely when people talked about
their primary person and love and true love and whatnot.
And, of course, I've had many versions of lots and lots of love.
Um... but this one's pretty stinking good.
Yeah.
She invited me to this party after a month had gone by,
and I thought, "What do I have to lose?"
And I immediately came in and she took a blowtorch,
-and was like-- -I was trying to impress him.
"Let me show you the bubbles in the pond."
And so she comes out with the blowtorch
and just starts blowtorching the frozen... brook, being like, "Isn't this cool?"
-And, to be fair, it was pretty cool. -It was cool.
-[Cas] After I came out to you... -[Gerri] Uh-huh.
[Cas] ...the initial conversation was... was hard and didn't go well and...
-[arrow twangs] -[Cas] You know--
[Gerri] It probably felt for a while that it was gonna be something
that was not gonna be forever.
I'm like, "Really?" You didn't think I was gonna stick?
So specifically this one didn't...
That I was going to grow out of it, and, like, how could you...
Really, Mom? At some point, you called me up out of the blue
and you said, "I was just watching the news and in Sacramento..."
And I remember you saying it was a gay protest, and I was like,
"We call those Gay Pride parades."
And you said, "But there was a woman
carrying a sign that said, ‘I love and support...’"
[sniffles]
It said, "I love and support my lesbian daughter." [sniffles]
And you said, "And I realized that,
of course, I love, but I haven't really supported you as a lesbian daughter."
[chuckles and sniffles]
I remember this conversation.
And you apologized, and, um...
I was... That was... It felt like a big moment.
Yeah.
[Cas] And it made my life much easier, in fact.
As I've been able to...
have more control over being in places and being surrounded by people
that are supportive of who I am
and who I can contribute to a community of people
who support and love each other...
I have less and less tolerance for places that aren't like that.
Come here.
[Cas] In my mind, I want...
every... Like, I want language,
I want gender, I want all of those things to work like a basic building block.
A basic building block, that can be
a car or a whale or a hat.
To have the malleability
that that has as kind of a placeholder
for our imagination to kind of build from.
So, who can tell me what, um...
what an inventor is? What's an inventor?
[Cas] The reason that I design for children is I'm designing for people.
These are the people that are gonna,
like, make the world suck or not suck. Right?
Good toys make good people.
And I really believe in that.
Who's got a question... Who's got a question for Cas?
What gave you the idea of making Rigamajigs?
[Cas] Well, I noticed
and I know that you all are capable
of building things that are big and exciting,
and that you have ideas of what you want to build
in such a way that you would get to choose what you were making
rather than me telling you what to make.
[Cas] Rigamajig has been on the market now for five years.
It translated more to being in the classroom
to teach curricular needs.
But also collaboration.
There's a lot of collaborative opportunities with materials that big.
It's designed in such a way that children need each other.
You have to get somebody to hold this end while you're screwing in
the bracket that's over there.
Well, they don't know what's going to come out of it,
because hopefully, in its best case, it's open-ended.
So, nobody knows what the children are gonna build.
Nobody knows what kind of interpersonal dynamics are gonna come out,
nobody knows where it might go.
Of course, the children, I don't think, experience that as vulnerability.
I think, for the kids, that's all just play, it's all unfolding.
My biggest challenges are other people's perceived rules.
Our overarching perception of risk
and what is an acceptable level of risk for children in play.
It's hard to remember that those are not real.
[chuckles]
Children can have a big heavy board and not get hurt.
[teacher] What do we say to Cas for inventing Rigamajig?
[children] Thank you!
Thank you for playing, and thank you so much for sharing with us.
Prior to the Fast Company article,
I think Cas was a little-known secret.
Mostly through social media, all of a sudden, she became known.
Rigamajig became known.
And so we had people contacting us
that we had never done outreach to.
[cell phone ringing]
[Cas] A couple years ago, someone contacted me and said...
[woman, over phone] "I've seen your stuff in use in China.
It's a region of schools that I work with.
They have a couple of prototypes of something similar to Rigamajig.
Basically, long story short, you're being knocked off in China.
But not by us, 'cause we'd like to work with you."
[Cas] And so, my...
my first instinct, hearing that Rigamajig was being used in some schools there,
I thought, "That's much better than
whatever stereotype of Chinese schools I had."
Then I also thought, “Well, let me see what they've done with it,
because I'm sure they've changed it slightly, and maybe they improved it.”
And she just started showing me these images of what they call Anji Play.
Kids building elaborate structures and leaping off of barrels.
And I was speechless.
At that point, I had been working for over a decade
in playground design and material design.
And, to some extent, like, I had kind of stopped trying
to do something that ideal.
I knew it was possible that children could do all those things.
I didn't know it was possible to let them,
because of rules and liability.
The idea that Rigamajig was being knocked off was really disappointing.
And Doug, my business manager, was like, "We have to stop them."
But the person who was making it
was different than the person who was buying it.
And so we realized that we could be chasing patent infringers
or we could try to partner with the schools.
[children squealing and chattering]
[speaks Chinese]
[laughing] How's it going?
Yeah?
You're regrouping to go play?
[children chattering]
Oh! [laughing]
Okay!
After you, my friends.
[Cas] Very quickly, I went to China and I learned that
in this region, there were 120 schools
and 14,000 children using this model.
[children chattering]
[opera music playing]
[Cas chuckling]
They're outside for two hours a day,
they have these incredible assortment of materials...
building with these giant blocks,
leaping off of ladders.
They decide what they're playing with, they bring it out, they put it away.
The teachers are really brilliant observers.
I shifted from the initial protective shock,
and I immediately knew that I needed to
be involved and learn from what Ms. Cheng was doing in Anji Play.
Ms. Cheng, she's the founder
and had kind of been developing Anji Play over the course of 16 years.
And Ms. Cheng is... is a genius.
[speaking in Chinese] When talking about the relationship
between designers and children,
we had a lot in common.
So, we felt like old friends.
So, we asked Cas
to help us
with standardization of Anji Play.
[Cas] We have been working to bring Anji Play to the US
and the rest of the world.
I suppose, to some extent, I'm the design director.
Today, Ms. Cheng pointed out that the children love
playing with things that are off-balance.
And so, I'm thinking about some new ways that some of the materials or things
could be compatible with the larger system,
and bring in ways that they can experiment with balance more.
The unstable... I saw children put the A-frame
or the double ladder onto one of the barrels.
Yep. Would it be good if the slats went all the way through?
The same way that it might line up with the climbing cubes?
-‘Cause that... that would be-- -Yeah.
Also, a funny kind of... I would imagine if it's going this way...
[laughter]
And this would be... Actually, this would be a good teeter-totter.
The driving ethos is what we're curious about.
And that's such a big shift
from "What did you learn?"
Right? That there's an outcome,
that there's a thing that is to be learned,
that we know what can be learned,
and therefore you're out to look for it.
I was watching these girls, this tire course,
and they pull the tire up there,
and then they roll it down the plank,
and it goes through the... the tube
and then lands into the cube.
And as soon as it got in, then, of course, like,
what's the point? So, then they keep making it more and more complicated.
'Cause easy is boring.
I do have hope that if you show schools where this really, really works
and then you get another school to try it and another school to try it,
that you can get this kind of contagion effect.
Because you see it in the children.
You see their joy, you see them learning, you see them growing.
It's not just about children, that's truly about humanity.
So...
I'm going to be hopeful that we can get, like, a little bit going,
and, you know, a little bit can add to a little more of Anji.
[Cas] I think that design is critical to our future, and the world.
And all of my designs, whether it's Rigamajig
and the occasional playground design and project that I do,
Geemo and then with Anji Play,
all of them are about empowering thinking outside of the archetype.
I saw it as an opportunity to have an impact on the future.
I don't... It's funny.
I don't... It's not that I like kids.
I don't dislike kids. I like people.
I am...
I’m sure I'm going to get some pushback from that, but it's true.
And so, in my mind... [chuckles]
...if we can give kids the tools to build confidence
and have agency and understand
how to be creative, empathetic, good people, then I thoroughly believe
that they will make a better future for all of us.
If we can play together, then we can live together.