While recently going through some items in my mom’s basement, I found the “1967 Toy of the Year.” With the exception of a few missing pieces, the
Spirograph I shared with my brother was almost perfectly intact: plastic circles and rings, colored pens, pins, storage tray, a piece of cardboard, a pad of white paper, and the “pattern booklet.”
The still-popular, mass-produced toy from the 60s is the embodiment of controlled emotion in the face of the decade’s social unrest and conflict. The Spirograph promoted adherence to procedures and non-controversial design through a methodical process.
Although the Spirograph provided hours of fun, wonder, and amazement for my brother and I as we formed our simple patterns, using it again as an adult has prompted a few thoughts on wonder and its limitations.
Designed by British engineer
Denys Fisher in 1962 and acquired by the American manufacturer
Kenner Toys in 1966, the first and simplest of many subsequent Spirograph versions hit the stores in 1967, the year we received ours as a Christmas gift. The accompanying manual stated that the toy "stimulates the imagination and develops creativity,” and that there would be “no limit to the different designs you can make!”
The set has 18 sizes of small circles that fit into two large rings. Designs are created by placing a pen in a circle’s holes and moving the circle inside a ring, which is pinned down in the cardboard to make it stationary. The pattern booklet shows a dozen designs and describes the required ring, circle(s), and pen positions. For example, one formula (abbreviated) reads: "Pin RING no. 144/96 to Paper and Baseboard, the No. 1 mark at the top…with pen in Hole 3 draw another pattern. Repeat, using Holes 5 and 7."
The design procedure is both methodical and repeatable, with the patterns yielding virtually exact copies by all users. The most fun for us came not by following the patterns or the rules but randomly mixing colors, moving the circles and rings at will, and placing lots of pinholes in our designs.
The Spirograph demonstrates, if not promotes, the belief that design can be formulaic and that good design has something to do with simplicity and objectivity. However, qualitative aspects such as emotion, irrationality, and instinct are largely missing. The patterns themselves make no direct reference to a user’s nationality, ethnicity, social class, or gender. Choices are officially confined to color and template combinations.
The focused geometric and rational visual language and limited plastic components restrict the range of outcomes and equalize abilities. It brings to mind a Swedish saying my wife told me: “Everyone wants you to succeed, as long as you’re not doing better than they are.” Our designs were original but not too original.
We received our Spirograph as the space race was underway and the Cold War was yet to thaw, the summer of love was over and the
Tet Offensive was soon to begin. Soon my brother would receive his draft lottery number. Perhaps the Spirograph offered a bit of rationality and order to the chaos. It was predictable and socially safe. Any combination of templates and color would result in a Spirograph manual “sanctioned” design. The toy gave the illusion of counter-culture experimentation, yet furthered the establishment adherence to staying the course.
Yet I felt a sense of pride in the detailed patterns I could draw. It was incredible, magical, how quickly overlapping circles would create a dynamic and mesmerizing design. Even more, I was in awe of the more complex and colorful patterns my older brother could create. Perhaps he was working through the stress of receiving his impending call to duty.
What set the Spirograph apart from our other toys in that era was the suggestion that we were actually making something (art). Drawing patterns was more than simply assembling parts in various combinations to create a temporary object to be taken apart (e.g.,
Legos) or moving a stylus to create a temporary design to be erased (e.g.,
Etch-A-Sketch).
Allowing repeatable solutions, minimizing differences, and channeling outcomes in part describe the 1967 Toy of the Year. Denys Fisher’s design was an outgrowth of his work on Vietnam-era munitions, research no doubt guided by procedures and constraints.
Thankfully, my brother made it through the Vietnam War without getting drafted, and we recently played a round of Spirograph together. At the bottom of the box were some patterns we had drawn 41 years earlier. Looking back, I clearly saw how limits can provide a sanctuary, foster exploration, and with some imagination generate beauty. But the random pinholes in the official paper pad reinforce the notion that sometimes moving outside of what’s expected has its place, too.
Comments [26]
05.08.08
07:20
05.08.08
07:31
05.09.08
05:44
05.09.08
08:40
I'm excited to see the update on your book. Pre-ordered on Amazon. Hope you're doing well at SAIC.
Jessi (Hunter) Long, OSU Alum
05.09.08
11:10
05.09.08
11:50
Just to show it wasn't only a kids' toy, the great movie poster illustrator Richard Amsel used Spirograph patterns in his art for Hello Dolly from 1969:
http://adammcdaniel.com/AmselArt/Amsel_HelloDollyOriginalArt.jpg
First professional use? Or did it get used in ads around that time as well? Curious that the Spirograph took off right at the time when people were seeing those kinds of patterns on a regular basis while using LSD and other drugs.
05.09.08
12:24
John, good to hear that you're still out and about. Go Beavs!
Darrin
(another OSU alum)
05.09.08
01:30
05.09.08
01:36
Damn kid's toy almost killed me, yet its mesmerizing patterns fascinated me for years afterwards.
05.09.08
02:09
It had never occurred to me at the time that the Spirograph could, in fact, prove to be just as viable an exercise in breaking beyond the suggested bounds for use. In retrospect, I wish I had asked for one of them for a Birthday or Christmas. Thankfully, I'm in a position now where I could easily go out and grab one should the urge so strike me.
Glad to hear more insight from you, John, even if it is indirectly. Hope all's well.
-Evan Rowe
(soon to be) OSU Alum
05.10.08
12:38
05.10.08
09:13
For the Sundance project we bought a bunch of Spirographs on ebay (they're really cheap when they're missing parts), jammed the gears, broke some of the teeth and went to town! I still have a stack of nine different versions (including a pristine never-opened Super Spirograph) here in my office.
05.10.08
03:15
05.10.08
11:50
Great read, Professor Bowers.
_lap le (another from osu)
05.11.08
12:19
Harmongraphs look great but are a slightly different process to the Spirograph, the former being an open and unending design, the latter being closed and finite. Harmonographs are also more random, being subject to the minute variations created by the speed and motion of the pendulum. There's a nice period article about them here:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/07/05/pendulums-draw-novel-designs/
And there are more recent examples of people creating them using swinging lights suspended over cameras set to a very long exposure.
05.11.08
12:28
This was a great read!
05.11.08
04:46
Before I logged in to DO today I blogged at my site about airline route maps which are real world, growed up designer versions of the geometric and rational patterns that Spirographers created. I assume what prompted me to write about the route maps today was seeing that Spirograph-like box yesterday. So I guess that Spiropgraph does have an aspect of emotion and irrationality attached to it. Unless I am just attached to Spirograph nostalgia.
Great post, thanks.
05.12.08
04:39
But now, after read it, i think it was me the guigue by thinking that.
My congrats about the crossover between Spirograph and Design. It's all there, we just need to combine shapes and colors to do Design.
With such random object, we (you) could produce the beggining of what could be the next poster for...Radioactivity??(just kidding).
"...The Spirograph demonstrates, if not promotes, the belief that design can be formulaic and that good design has something to do with simplicity and objectivity. However, qualitative aspects such as emotion, irrationality, and instinct are largely missing. The patterns themselves make no direct reference to a user’s nationality, ethnicity, social class, or gender. Choices are officially confined to color and template combinations..."
Sure did.
Design could be like the Spirograph. Is all about choices and decisions. If going by rules or "no más rules"...If we pick blue or orange. If we pick the standard pen or pick a brush. If it's a circle or a square.
Nice article
(sorry for my bad english)
Sérgio Paulino.
05.12.08
06:49
Even before I "mastered" Spirograph, I was already using it within my mixed media masterpieces. But then that was how all toys were used in my house: combining toy sets into something better than the sum total of their parts isolated from one another. And when an artistic flourish could be incorporated into whatever it was I was playing — usually a game that at age seven I began to call "City Emergency" — with whatever art materials, media, toys and/or tools, then all the better.
05.13.08
01:32
I recall that it came with colored ballpoint pens - correct?
Within a year or two, I was buying my first ever Flair pens.
05.13.08
10:35
...but still interesting.
05.17.08
09:46
I also agree that a toy can be formative - and can build the basis for understanding general principles of our various realities. To a kid .. thats what they are - principles .. they don't become rules (and in design - "tastefully" prevailing opinion- ha ha) until later in life.
Here is what i have found about critical writing (especially about design). The writing can be insightful and wonderful .. but often the interesting flights of fancy and vacuumed intellectual discourse side step the cornerstone. In this case - spirographs - wonderful toy. Can it be made in to an argument of rationality, limitation and control vs emotion and instinct in design ? Sure - just like a piece of paper itself limits you to its confines, and a pencil to its color, etc ad nauseam . It wasn't created to be that though- so its like a partial fiction to prove a point - or dispense a moral.
05.22.08
04:06
05.28.08
09:47
http://www.wordsmith.org/~anu/java/spirograph.html
05.30.08
05:47
06.05.08
02:53