My goal for this toy was to create a postmodern-style parody of modernist "blockitecture" through cartoony, over-exaggerated forms in bright colors in an underestimated but meaningful material. Postmodernist architecture is guided by several principles that were a marked reaction against the anonymity of the modernist glass box, embracing a pluralism of form and meaning (i.e, the form and aesthetic is derived from the significance of the structure's context, materiality, and purpose, and vice versa). It also seeks to dissolve the barriers between pop art and high culture through design choices that are guided by principles of classicism and traditional architecture movements, but are rendered in modern materials.

For this project, then, inflatable plastic is the ideal representation of postmodernism. As a material it is underestimated because of its ubiquity and cheap cost, but it has incredible technical potential from creating cheap, portable, and large-scale inhabitable spaces to space travel and settlements. In addition, we subconsciously imbue inflatable objects with a lot of meaning. The majority of people who saw my project commented that we should use them as pool floaties - a meaning that is prescribed to inflatables because of pre-held cultural context. The toys also have an innate sense of individuality to them, because they invite the player to invest a lot of themselves into playing with them. The individual is directly involved in the construction/deconstruction of the toy, and can actively shape his or her own environment. When they fill the toys with air from their own lungs, it is as if they are putting a part of themselves into the environment that they are building.