MAKE FREE
What My Wife Taught
Me About Toys Today
By Cory Doctorow, Digital Rights Defender
; DIY DOLLS:
Can 3D printing
bring toy making
back home? A
prototype from
MakieLab.
It’s a funny example of the law of unintended consequences: the regulatory costs of
ensuring that toys are safe have pretty much
guaranteed that toys will also be junk. Alice
is hoping 3D printing will be able to reverse
that. She believes there’ll be at least two
markets for printed toys: first, the market for
toys printed on high-end, expensive, patent-encumbered devices from Eos and Z Corp.,
which will require an intermediary like hers to
produce, but which will also be well situated
to go through the regulatory stuff necessary
to get toys approved.
At the other end of the market are the
maker-ish households where someone’s built
a DIY 3D printer. These are, generally speaking, lower-res than anything you’d see in a toy
shop today (though I recently got a preview of
the next generation and, hoo-boy, it’s pretty
tastily high-res!), but they have the advantage
of being present in homes where parents
might print the toys themselves, assuming
(Alice hopes) any safety liability.
Alice has been thinking hard about how to
make a game that uses mecha-like toy parts
you print yourself and also trying to figure out
how she’d make any money off it. I’m pretty
sure there’s an opportunity there somewhere,
and it’s awfully fun watching Alice and her
business partners try to find it. ;
WHEN MAKE TOLD ME THIS ISSUE’S
theme was toys and games, I realized I was
going to have to take my work home with me.
My wife, Alice Taylor (a former pro gamer who
played Quake on the English national team), is
running MakieLab ( makielab.com), a startup
whose goal is to deliver games and tools
where kids will create virtual toys. Players will
be able to press a button and have those toys
printed on a nearby 3D printer and delivered
to them. I picked Alice’s brain for everything
she’s learned about toys. Here’s the lowdown.
Toys don’t have to be complex, and the
market doesn’t often value quality (McDonald’s
is the world’s biggest toy maker, in the form
of fall-apart Happy Meal toys). One stick
makes a good toy, as my 3-year-old daughter
can attest. Two sticks make an awesome toy.
Throw in various bits of paper, cardboard, and
plastic, and you’ve got play for days.
More than 95% of the world’s commercial
toys are made in China, often in the country’s
lowest-grade factories.
Non-Chinese toy making is a difficult business: between the high regulatory hurdles
set by safety agencies and the razor-thin
margins, mom-and-pop toymakers often go
under or go offshore. Alice and I are sentimental bourgeois who love the idea of well-made wooden toys, and the brand we favored,
Melissa and Doug, began sporting “Made in
China” stickers not long after we discovered
them. True to form, the last thing we got from
them, a toy piano, had such poor build quality
that it disintegrated in the first hour of play.
makielab.com
For an extended version of this column,
visit makezine.com/28/doctorow.
Cory Doctorow’s latest novel is Makers ( Tor Books U.S.,
HarperVoyager U.K.). He lives in London and co-edits the
website Boing Boing.
33 Follow us @make
