Product trumps marketing: Stop telling me Goldie Blox is revolutionary

As the only football lover in my house, I used all kinds of tactics to lure everyone in to watching the Super Bowl with me. Snacks work, and so does the promise of a showcase of some of the best commercials of the year. So together we sat yesterday, me watching/tweeting the abysmal game, John looking up how to build our new house (another blog post on this forthcoming) and the kids grazing on a buffet of snack foods and gathering for the commercial breaks to critique the ads.

When the commercial for Goldie Blox came on, I not only paid attention to the commercial, but also to my 7 year old daughter's reaction. She is the target audience for Goldie Blox, my princess who loves to read, create art, hike, cook and build things. She received Goldie Blox as a gift for Christmas, and she knows that it's supposed to inspire her to learn engineering and math and engage in problem solving. Except...it doesn't. And as we watched the ad together, Sallie simply said as the commercial ended, "I have that toy. It's not that fun."

Exactly. And that's the problem with Goldie Blox in general. It's a great story, and it's marketing is targeted at adults who want their daughters to know that they can do or build anything. It sells itself as the solution to parental guilt. It tells parents, "you don't want to discriminate against your daughters in the toys you buy them, do you? Buy this toy to teach your little princess that she can do anything that boys can do."

There are so many problems with this. For one, Goldie Blox are still overwhelmingly pink and feminine. So much for "disrupting the pink aisle." But if you look past the feminization of non-gender specific activities, if you accept that maybe the first step in getting girls interested in STEM education and careers is by making them pink, there is an even bigger issue, as my 7 year old so simply noted: Goldie Blox are "not that fun."

The commercials, both the Super Bowl spot and the Rube Goldberg machine video that went viral where the use of Beastie Boys' "Girls" was used and is now in a legal dispute over copyright infringement, show girls creating all of these elaborate contraptions to complete simple tasks (as a designer, I could also cast a mark against them for promoting "over-design," but there are bigger fish to fry). None of those things are actually possible using the Goldie Blox toy. As an instructional designer and a game designer, one of the things that I talk about a lot is replayability. A game isn't much fun if you play it once and win...what's your motivation to play it again? And that's basically what happens with Goldie Blox. A few simple pieces that can be put together to create a contraption, following the accompanying story about Goldie, and then the toy is done. Boring. Not obviously replayable. Not that fun.

My 7 year old daughter has the luxury of having older brothers, brothers who play Minecraft and have a bazillion LEGOs and who have Snap Circuits. We are also a "maker" family that builds robots and upcycles old cake pans into lights, who sews each other presents and that has a hot glue gun on the ready next to our spare circuit boards and googly eyes. We often discuss as a family what 3D printing projects we want to take on, and whether or not it's worth getting an Arduino kit (it is). She sees me building and making things right alongside "the guys" and coming up with my own solutions to science, math and engineering problems. She does enjoy the pink aisle when we visit a toy store, but she also enjoys figuring out how to solve a problem when we're building something.

I see a lot of people praising Goldie Blox as revolutionary. Ugh. Do these people have a 7 year old daughter? Have they tried to play with Goldie Blox with a little girl? More than once? Yeah...not that fun. Just because the marketing messages tell you that a toy is revolutionary doesn't mean it is. Just because you make engineering tools pink doesn't mean girls will want to use them. If you want to get girls into STEM, then don't make it about them being girls. Give them an interesting problem to solve and the tools and support to solve it. Inspire their creativity and their problem solving skills to address an issue that they are passionate about. Don't tell girls that they need different toys than boys, or reinforce for boys that LEGOs or circuitry is only for them because they aren't pink. Stop reinforcing gender bias through color and marketing. Girls don't need separate toys to learn science and engineering, they want and need role models.

You aren't supporting a revolution in girls' involvement in STEM by heaping praise on Goldie Blox. You are supporting gender differentiation in non-gender specific activities, and supporting a company that's making a pretty crappy toy. Just ask a 7 year old girl.



More articles on Goldie Blox:
Another girl's review
Another take on dumbing down engineering toys for girls

Makers

There's a lot of talk about the "creative class" and what it means to be a designer. The problem is, everyone wants to be a designer, everyone wants to be creative...people understand what that means. Being a designer means that you make things. And making...creation...has some magic to it.

We've been starting to notice this around our house. Whenever someone says something utterly ridiculous, we will say, "I'm sure that was the first time those words have ever been put together in that way." It's a moment of magic when you think that, potentially, you said something that's never been said before and it elicits a strong response (usually around here it's laughter).

I respect writers who are crafting new ideas and eliciting emotions through words; they are makers. Artists, who through music or performance or through a physical manifest of their creativity, are magical in their creation of the meaningful new. It's that concept, the "meaningful new," that differentiates makers from everyone else.

Yes, everyone else. There are the talkers, the "futurists," who imagine what might be and fancy themselves designers because they throw out big ideas into the universe. The talkers may have credit for coming up with ideas, but it is the makers who actually craft the future.

There are the documentors, the people who capture what is. They are the journalists, the recordkeepers, the scribes, the librarians; they are the people who preserve reality and hold our memories to task. Their scrapbooks and archives are imperfect and biased, but they help us reflect on where we are and help us measure how far we progress. It is the makers whose progress they are documenting.

There are the opportunists. They will sell and promote what the makers make. Without them, we may not discover and benefit from the makers. They are the communicators, the marketers, the sales people. They try to tie the emotion to the innovation, to tell the story of the new. Without the makers, they have no story to tell.

Then there are the critics, who assign value to the work the makers do. They also are communicators, but what they communicate is their opinion, nothing more. They sit in judgment, counting on others to find them credible in their opinions. Without makers continuing to risk judgment, critics would have nothing to judge.

Beebo and Gearmo, made by John Pagano

Finally, there are consumers. We all are consumers, but many people are only consumers. We buy what others design and build and create to help us at work, at home...sometimes just for enjoyment. We want the new. We want to feel like we are makers, if only because we accumulate and consume what they make.  It is a human drive, based in learning, curiosity and delight, to discover and design and create.

When I woke up this morning, I followed my usual pattern of checking Twitter. I read all kinds of opinions and judgments, saw photography documenting peoples' activities and behavior, and read many, many tweets of people trying to sell me something, either a product or their opinions. Then I got a text from my partner, who today is on the east coast. He sent me a picture of  the robot he made from found objects this morning with his son. With the magic of a creator, they designed Beebo with springs for legs and wheels for feet, with a head that swivels, eyeballs that roll, and a kitchen timer heart beat (later I found out that he had made a second one for me named Gearmo). This is what makers do. They make things that change us, inspire us and make the world better. They are the catalyst for progress.

Z and the bots 

What are you making?