Innovative Design of Traditional Educational Toys Based on
Experience Design
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Zhejiang University of Science and Technology
Hangzhou, ZheJiang Province 310023, China
hgyid@163.com
Abstract
Innovative product design based on experience design
results in more personalized and emotionalized products. The
design philosophies vary with different needs of different
target users. By analyzing the features of Traditional Chinese
educational toys, the paper proposes a new mode of
innovative product design based on experience design, and by
referring to and making use of the design philosophies that
make foreign toys successful, points out the direction for
innovative design of traditional educational toys.
Keywords: Experience design, Traditional Chinese
educational toys, innovative design
ĉ. Basic Ideas about Experience Design
The Disney Theme Park is a land of joy, where Disney
works are presented to be experienced by visual, auditory,
olfactory, gustatory, and tactile senses, clips of classic Disney
movies are fully displayed, and all those wonderful memories
play back perfectly in a moment. The Disney Theme Park,
“The Entertainment Capital of the World” Las Vegas, and
various theme restaurants popular in the urban such as glacial
period theme and aviation theme restaurants, provide us with a
lot of opportunities to experience different things. Such
emotional interaction between the experiences and the
experiencers are a representation of spirit. It is the
combination of sense and sensibility, and people’s
materialistic and psychological needs, all of which are
indispensable and ever changing, transforming, and replacing
with the change of times and environment.
Experience economy is described in the book The
Experience Economy by Joseph Pine like this: “A company
provides its service as the focal point and products as the
materials to create memorable feelings for the consumers,
form the sensory experience and ideological acceptance, draw
the consumers’ attention, identify their consumption behavior,
and find out the new value of and room for its products”. [1]
Nathan Shedroff explained it as getting consumers involved in
the design, where a company makes its service as the “stage”,
products as the “props”, and environment as the “scenery” to
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enable consumers with a wonderful experience during the
process of the business activity.
Ċ. Features of Traditional Chinese Educational
Toys
The design of Chinese traditional educational toys is the
result of the Chinese culture over the centuries. These toys are
designed to be highly intelligence-provoking and interesting,
such as the Tangram, the Nine Interlinks, the Huarong Trail,
and Magic Cubes, etc. With the advancement of science and
technology, however, more and more of nowadays’ toys are
being produced with application of high technology, new
techniques, and are being made as electrical, intelligent, laser
toys or other types of hi-tech toys with increasing added
value. These toys are not only highly entertaining but also
meet modern children’s curiosity about high technology and
their desire for excitement. Besides, hi-tech toys are mostly
available as foreign brands, while Traditional Chinese
educational toys are rarely available in the market but in
exhibition halls or temple fairs. Compared with modern
educational toys, Traditional Chinese educational toys are
characterized in:
1. Focus on edutainment
Traditional Chinese toys represent much importance
attached to edutainment, which means educational
entertainment or entertainment-education. For example,
playing with the Nine Interlinks is an exercise of brain as well
as the hands, which helps develop and improve logical
thinking and also helps make people more concentrated on
and patient about their study and work. The Nine Interlinks
are a set of toy consisted of nine rings and a frame. Each ring
is connected to a straight rod that goes through the next ring,
and the other end of the nine rods are fixed in place with a
board or ring. The Nine Interlinks is a complicated,
challenging, and interesting toy to play with. A lot of
mathematical knowledge is involved in it, and by play with it,
children are challenged and helped to explore, develop, and
improve their intelligence[2]. For the first time when someone
plays with this toy, she needs to think and reason, have great

 patience and determination to meet the challenge. The more
she plays with it, the more skilled she becomes and has a more
profound understanding about the toy and thus realizes the
ideas and thoughts hidden in the toy.
҉. Direction for innovative design of traditional
educational toys based on experience design
1. Comparison of modes of product innovation

2. Focus on learning about traditional culture from the

games
Feasibility of Product
Among so many Traditional Chinese educational toys,
new products innovation
the Huarong Trail is about the Battle of Chibi during the
Three Kingdom Period. The toy is set in the background of
the story where the famous warlord Cao Cao escaped towards
Jiangling through Huarong Trail. The toy serves as a very
good storybook in a way. By playing the game, people can
learn about its historic background and experience the historic Customers’
figure’s life and destiny in the particular scene. Rather than a purchasing choice
simple toy, it carries traditional Chinese culture and thoughts.
Huarong as in the name of the toy refers to Huarong County,
the best route for Cao Cao to escape to Jiangling. In the
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a historic story well known Original mode of product design
by a lot of Chinese over history is described: ĀZhuge Liang
wisely made the Huarong trick, and Guang Yunchang let go (a)
of Cao Cao for the former favorsā. [3]
Innovative product mode based on experience
economy. See chart 3.
3. Focus on developing hands-on ability
Feasibility of Offer
Traditional Chinese educational toys are also characterized experience
with the focus on developing hands-on ability. For example, new products
the tangram game allows combination to have more than 1000
patterns. Tangram looks simply structured and easy to
manipulate, but that simple seven pieces can be used to form a Direct customers’
lot of figures, animals, objects, and scenes, etc. There are Product purchasing choice
more challenging patterns that can be pieced. The challenge is innovation by experience
also the fun of tangram. 䥋ᄅ

4. Environmental-friendly materials and smart ideas New mode of innovative

product design
Traditional Chinese educational toys are commonly made
of wood, bamboo and metal, which are readily available
around us. The materials are handy, inexpensive, and
environmental-friendly as they are mostly recyclable. These
features coincide with the society's idea of green environment
It can be seen that innovative product design based upon
or environmental protection. Traditional folk toys are the
experience design lead to more personalized and
products of Chinese culture over the centuries, and it takes
emotionalized products designed. To meet the different
master hand and fine craftwork to make them. These toys
consumers' needs, there should be different ideas of design
involve handily accessible materials, come in diversified
accordingly. By adding perceptive experiences of people’s
forms and dozens, or even thousands of ways to play with
visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and/or tactile sense in
them. If the mass production of modern products and
the design, capturing the reasonable interaction between
scientific technologies are properly integrated while the
product and human, fully utilizing the features of human
cultural characteristics of traditional Chinese educational toys
senses in design of products, the products can turn out to be
are retained, then we will have the kind of products that cater
more attractive and bring people spiritual pleasure.[5]
for the modern market.


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2. Direction for innovative design of traditional ducational
toys based on experience design
Today's toy development tends to turn to development of
toys of larger size or scale, and toys in the future are even
expected to become more operable and more experience-
oriented. Speaking of experience, one cannot think of
Disneyland that is all about experience. Disneyland offers a
rich variety of items for experience by means of, for example,
fairy recreational facilities. There are facilities for people to
experience taking part in Festival of the Lion King, and
meeting Disney friends like Mickey, Minnie, and Donald
Duck, joining Winnie Pooh's venture, flying over the Space
Mountain, and Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters, etc. In here,
experiences go to its maximum possibility. When we develop
the traditional Chinese educational toy, the Huarong Trail, we
can refer to experience function. Rather than focusing on the
product itself only, we should pay more attention to its
historic background and the history story about it. This kind of
toy can be made an experience of history education. When
children are listening to the story of the Three Kingdoms in
their classroom, or when they are watching historic TV plays
or movies about the Battle of Chibi or other tales about the
Three Kingdoms, the children are just lookers-on. Instead, if
they stand right in front of large toys of the Three Kingdoms,
the representation of the battlefield from the time of the Three
Kingdoms and the representation of the figures from the Three
Kingdoms will become a part of their surroundings as they are
too. When the children put on an outfit and carry the weapons
from the time of the Three Kingdoms to play a role of that
time, they can experience the history, the figures, and the
personalities of the figures while playing the game.
2.2 Design of toys with systematic and serial experience
Currently, traditional educational toys are not developed in
a systematic way. Take the Nine Interlinks for instance, while
it is one of the most mysterious and amazing toys ever
invented by human being, the development of this toy is not
innovative in other ways but the materials. It gets made of
alloy, copper and something else but the design has hardly
changed, let alone to say systematic development of this toy.
Take the Transformers for comparison, since they landed in
China, great profits at five billion yuan have been made,
owing to the constant systematic experience and systematic
development. The toymaker Hasbro sticks to its business
mode of “toys before animation”, which enables the
consumers to have continuous experience of the figures. The
toy-to-animation cycle has made Hasbro succeed in taking
adults into the supposedly childish world of the Transformers,
with the 2007 live-action movie The Transformers as the best
proof.
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2.3 Traditional educational toys for experience of modern
technology
Traditional Chinese educational toys are designed as the
products of Chinese culture over the centuries, and the way
they are designed and the materials they are made of are
greatly different from that of modern toys. A fledgling
toymaker called Zizzle beat out the industry's big guns Hasbro
and Mattel, and win the master toy license for Disney’s
"Pirates of the Caribbean" sequel. Zizzle set a great example
of adding scientific and technological creation to traditional
toys. In order to provoke inspiration for design, Zizzle
decorated the hotel room they had rented to look like a
pirate’s lair, with axes hanging on the walls, gold coins
thrown all over the room, and even CEO Roger Shiffman
wore a pirate hat and chief marketing officer Marc Rosenberg
donned some pirate-like headgear. They themselves had
experienced a lot to learn about pirate’s life, studied plots of
the movie, and looked up related documents and information.
The toy figures they designed are not simple duplicates of the
figures from the movie but rather the former gave the latter a
second life. [6]
2.4 Direction for innovative design of traditional
educational toys of independent brands independently
developed
China is a big country of toys but not a strong toy making
country. More than half Chinese toymakers get designs and
raw materials provided from overseas. They make very little
profits, only getting the processing fee and overhead charge as
OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). The 2008
financial crisis brought global toy market down, made China’s
toys export volume drop drastically. After that, foreign trade
protectionism became harsher. With insufficient independent
brands and famous brands, there is an even smaller margin for
China. These are the biggest challenges for China’s toy
industry. Due to the limit to their capability of design, many
Chinese toymakers have been imitating or copying foreign
toymakers’ design, and that leads to frequent occurrence of
patent infringement. Only those toymakers with their
independent brands and develop toys on their own can better
pass on and carry forward the design of traditional educational
toys.
Č. Conclusion
To sum up, innovative design of traditional Chinese
educational toys based on experience design will greatly
change the appearance, implications, and functions of
traditional educational toys. The use of new materials meets
the demand of the era’s development and enormously
enhances toy products’ competitiveness and economic
benefits in the market. We will be able to create educational
toys with the Chinese nationality’s characteristics, if and only
if we refer to and make use of the ideas of successful design

 of modern toys, further study traditional educational toys,
reasonably apply the ideas of experience design, integrate the
national, traditional, and cultural features of traditional
Chinese educational toys with international, fashionable, and
scientific features of toys in general, and never stop
innovation.

References:
[1] Pine, Joseph. & Gilmore, James. The Experience Economy.
Beijing: China Machine Press; 2002.
[2] Wang, L.H. Folk Toy Patterns. Changsha: Hunan Fine Arts
Publishing House; 2000: 18.
[3] Ye, Z.X. Deities from Traditional Chinese Folk Art. Beijing:
China Light Industry Press; 2000: 18.
[4] Cagan, Jonathan. & Vogel, Craig. Creating Breakthrough
Products: Innovation from Product Planning to Program Approval.
Beijing: China Machine Press; 2004.
[5] Norman, Donald. Emotional Design. Beijing: Electronic Industry
Press; 2005.
[6] Britton, Terry. Priceless: Turning Ordinary Products into
Extraordinary. Beijing: China Citic Press; 2003.


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