ShapeScapeS - Sculpture in a box
by Staff - 2008-06-16
As per their marketing materials: "Created by Los Angeles sculptor Peter Mayor, this beautifully simple toy has been designed to stimulate innovative play and increase children's spatial skills and color awareness. There are no buttons to push, no batteries to install; to 'operate' it you just need hands and an imagination. ShapeScapeS contains over 90 colorful pieces in whimsical shapes. The pieces are easy to put together and allows the user to build and infinite variety of vibrantly colored structures. You can make a figure, an animal, vehicle, any wild thing. Whatever you create can be taken apart of displayed as a sculpture, wall hanging, or mobile."
So what it looks like to us is a building/construction/modeling toy that due to the extremely original and unusual design of the pieces inspires a child, or maybe in fact forces them, to use their imagination to build something unusual and abstract. I really like the idea that the toy has no required, recommended, or even standard goal of what to build. All too often these days building toys are introduced with specific building goals required, such as build a jet, build a car, build a robot, etc. which is useful to toy marketers of course because then you can sell what is in essence the same pieces over and over because you have included exactly the right number of standard pieces, and often a few special pieces, to make that certain item on the cover. Here though with Shapescapes we have a construction toy, or more properly I guess a sculpture toy, that not only doesn't have a goal in mind, but in fact is specifically designed to produce very abstract and unique end results. I can't wait to get my hands on these.
A great First Impression
Okay so we finally got one of these to play with and the first thing that struck me is the container looks so much bigger than I thought it would be. The pieces come in a wide variety of shapes and colors and they are very sturdy. Nice thick plastic with no signs of molding marks, flashing, etc. Very clean and smooth with a nice heft and texture. Each piece feels good in the hand, you don't think of them as fragile at all. We couldn't wait for any kid testing on these yet, and dove right in to play with them ourselves. In fact my wife and I took them to bed with us and spent a couple hours playing with them, making different sculptures and smiling and laughing. They are really cool, and I can see that older kids and adults might be more attracted to them even than children. One other thought for now, I really think that a person might build a sculpture with these, and leave it built out as a decoration in the house where they might put a purchased sculpture of some kind. And I certainly think lots of people might set aside a shelf, or part of one, to store the container and the current work(s) between building sessions. Very cool, very fun stuff. We are going to go ahead and order some for the store before we even bother to do kid testing because they are really cool.