Timeless Design: Why the Toy Block endures

In an era filled with interactive toys, licensed characters, branding and scalability, all things designed for play are made with an expiry date. Toy companies would rather profit off of toys that have a high turnover rate than with those that provide actual playtime benefits. Obsolescence is not a bug in the toy industry; it is the business model.

Yet, despite the mass monetization and commercialization of toys since 1950s, a product that remains a common fixture found in many urban houses and schools globally since before the invention of plastic, is a humble toy block. Whether it be found in a bin of loose LEGO bricks or a set of old-school wooden cubes, one wonders if the very humility and the simplicity of the block is the reason for it has outlasted more detailed toy figurines.

This leads me to wonder; how much detail is too much detail in design? How many affordances become too many? How many affordances, either perceived or physical, are needed to signify a particular response? Does form follow function or does function follow form? The use of a toy block by a child encompasses multiple ways of perceiving, thus creating many modes of its function by inciting imagination and critical inquiry in their minds. This plurality of a toy block is the beauty of its design.

This article is an attempt to discuss why a toy block can become a durable case study in timeless design: a product which has managed to transcend its value beyond the average shelf-life.

Form Follows Function? Really?

The term was coined by architect Louis Sullivan in 1896, in the context of designing tall commercial buildings. The idea was that a structure’s shape should be dictated by its intended use and not by ornament for ornament’s sake. The saying has since become design scripture for designing things like buildings and chairs; objects with a stable job.

Play doesn’t have a stable job though. As Fred Rogers is widely quoted as saying, play is the work of childhood. That phrase itself is a small paradox. If play is intrinsically driven, then why do we create toys that define the function or purpose in play? The function is discovered, invented and abandoned in the act of playing itself.

Designing for play thus becomes an argument between utility, functionality versus formalism. For a toy to be designed to have a predefined purpose or way of playing with it or a particular method of interaction seems baseless. I want to propose a different design principle for play objects: not form follows function, but form follows form. Here, "form" is not shape in the sculptural sense — it's closer to the philosophical sense: an idea, a concept, something that exists prior to and independent of any single use. A form in this sense doesn't serve one function for one child; its value manifests differently depending on who encounters it, when, and where. It is, in a sense, non-local and non-temporal — it doesn't conform to a fixed utility because it was never built around one.

The Hyperobject of the Block

Here is where I think Timothy Morton's concept of the hyperobject becomes useful, even though Morton coined it for something much larger than a toy.

Morton describes hyperobjects as things so massively distributed across time and space that no single instance of them can be fully grasped — climate change, styrofoam, plutonium, the biosphere. They share a few properties: they are viscous (they stick to you, hard to escape once you've encountered them), nonlocal (any local manifestation is only a fragment of the whole thing), phased (they show up differently depending on the dimension or era you're viewing them from), and interobjective (they only become visible through their relations and effects, never as a single discrete object sitting in front of you).

I don't think it's a stretch to say the toy block, as an idea rather than an object, behaves like a small hyperobject. No single wooden cube or plastic brick is "the block" — each instance is just a local, temporary manifestation of something much larger: a form that has moved through Froebel's kindergarten "gifts" in the 1830s, through alphabet blocks on Victorian nursery floors, through LEGO's interlocking studs in the 1950s, through the abstracted, screen-based blocks of Minecraft and Tetris today. It is nonlocal — you'll find some version of it in nearly every culture with a tradition of childrearing. It is phased — wood in one era, injection-molded ABS plastic in another, pixels in a third — the same underlying form appearing differently depending on which century you're standing in. And it's interobjective: you can't point to "the block" itself, only to its relations — the stack, the collapse, the sorting, the rebuild.

This matters for the "form follows form" argument, because it suggests the block's durability isn't really about any particular block. No company owns it, no single material defines it, no single era invented it. What persists is the form itself — a nonlocal, non-temporal idea that keeps re-manifesting because it was never tightly coupled to one use, one story, one franchise. Licensed toys date badly because their form is welded to a specific narrative moment — a movie, a show, a trend cycle. The block dates badly at nothing, because it was never welded to a moment in the first place.

The Economics of Obsolescence vs. the Philosophy of Play

It's worth being honest about why most toys are built to expire, because the contrast sharpens what the block is doing differently.

Economically, the toy industry runs on turnover: licensing cycles, seasonal launches, character IP that ages out as a child "grows out of" a show, collectability mechanics that reward buying more rather than using longer. Value here is calculable — units sold, shelf life, market share, franchise tie-in revenue. A toy's economic worth is realized at the point of sale and depreciates from there; the manufacturer's incentive is for the child's attachment to expire on schedule, clearing shelf space for the next release.

Philosophically, play has been theorized almost in direct opposition to this. Johan Huizinga's idea of the "magic circle" treats play as a self-contained space with its own internal logic, separate from ordinary utilitarian life. D.W. Winnicott's notion of the transitional object treats a child's attachment to a plaything as something that supports psychological development precisely because its meaning is supplied by the child, not by the object's manufacturer. In both accounts, the value of play is not extracted at a point of sale — it's generated continuously, privately, and non-transactionally, every time the object is picked up again.

A toy block sits at an odd intersection of these two value systems. It is cheap to manufacture and endlessly reusable, which makes it a poor economic engine for repeat purchases — there's no expansion pack for a cube. But that same "poverty" of built-in narrative is exactly what gives it enormous philosophical value: because the manufacturer supplied so little meaning, the child has to supply almost all of it. Every stack is a new invention rather than a rerun. The economic incentive to keep selling story pushes toward detail and specificity; the philosophical value of play pushes toward openness and reuse. The block simply refuses the first pressure, and in doing so, accidentally maximizes the second.

Conclusion

This reframes the industrial designer's job. The task is no longer "what should this object do" but "what should this object afford, and how little can I specify while still inviting something to happen." Material, size, shape, weight, color, texture; every one of these becomes a lever not for dictating an outcome but for gently biasing a field of possible outcomes. And yet, the consideration of what value means in play, from economic and philosophic schools of thought. Perhaps that’s why a toy block has endured for so long, because blocks invite actions rather than a prescribed use. Their form guides play, doesn’t dictate it. Children learn through experimenting rather than following instructions. It doesn’t follow a school of thought; a block becomes the manifold school of thought.

Bibliography

Brosterman, Norman. Inventing Kindergarten. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997.

Froebel, Friedrich. The Education of Man. Translated by W. N. Hailmann. New York: D. Appleton, 1887.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Sullivan, Louis H. "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered." Lippincott's Magazine 57, no. 3 (March 1896): 403–9.

Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications, 1971.