PLAYING OUTSIDE THE BOX: THE CARDBOARD AESTHETIC IN CONTEMPORARY STE(A)M CULTURE

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, March 2022

The cardboard box has historically been regarded as the quintessential creative plaything. Anecdotes abound of children who prefer playing with the cardboard box over the toy it packaged. The Torrance Tests of creative Thinking (TTCT) used the box as a gauge of creativity, and in 2005, the cardboard box was inducted into the Toy Association’s Hall of Fame alongside other ad-hoc toys like the blanket and the stick. 

Through a series of case studies, the paper will articulate the contours of a “cardboard aesthetic” in children’s STE(A)M media and toy cultures. It will explore the contradictions of the cardboard box as both the exemplar of kids’ “out of the box” creative plaything and also an object inextricably implicated in global capitalism. The cardboard box’s ascendence within STE(A)M cultures curiously coincides with a perceived crisis in children’s creativity (indicated by steadily decreasing or stagnating test scores in the United States). The paper will thus probe the relationship between the box’s association with creativity and as the material and symbolic stuff of globalization—embodied by legions of goods circulating the planet in cardboard packaging. In this way, the paper will investigate cardboard as a site that makes visible how the transformative ethos associated with children’s STE(A)M cultures also reifies the conditions such cultures purport to challenge.