Cultivating Creativity: Technology, Toys, and Children’s Creative Work in the Twenty-first Century

Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) Conference / Atlanta, GA / Nov 2016

Children’s creativity has long been of interest to social and cognitive scientists, and recently to scholars in the humanities such as Amy Ogata, whose 2013 book Designing the Creative Child charts the transformation and commodification of children’s creativity in post WWII America. Today, creativity is a core value within contemporary children’s media and consumer cultures, central to the philosophy of companies like LEGO and informing the design of a range of technologies and toys for children. Products designed to unlock and enhance creativity increasingly emerge from alliances between traditional children’s companies such as Disney and Mattel and software and technology firms like Google and AutoDesk.

This paper explores the deployment of creativity in contemporary children’s consumer culture, investigating how recent creative playthings help define and shape how children’s creativity is understood in the popular imagination. Drawing on a series of case studies, such as Mattel’s forthcoming 3D printer the ThingMaker and Disney’s open world toys-to-life game platform Infinity, the paper demonstrates creativity’s prominent alignment with STEM and STEAM initiatives that position children as makers rather than consumers. Moreover, it probes both how corporate stakeholders define creativity and articulates the opportunities and constraints associated with these creative products, such as affording users the chance to build from modular components and customize aesthetic components. Nuancing conventional claims that naturalize the relationship between creativity and childhood, the paper considers the possibilities and limitations for creative activity built into these toys’ material and technological structures.