Toys were us

Stephen Bayley has been judging a competition to find the toy of the year. But his search for a 21st-century equivalent to Lego or Barbie has been in vain. Is this the end of a classic era of toymaking?

Are toys dead? Ever since that distant day in 1981 when Shigeru Miyamoto designed an electronic golem for the Donkey Kong video-games arcade and Nintendo was born, that lugubrious suspicion has been slowly hardening into an electron-powered possibility. Toys are still a £2bn business in Britain, but it is obvious that the fantasy lives of children today are more exercised by computers and DVDs than dolls or cowboy outfits, their cupidity satisfied by mobiles, their role-playing by Beyoncé, The Darkness and Zara, and their fascination with the miniature by iPod.

I was ruminating on this one September morning sitting in a boardroom in the West End, surrounded by the Alien Agency DNA Lab (£39.99), a Deluxe Metal Telescope and Microscope (£49.99), The Barbie B Book Learning Laptop (£49.99), a Lord of the Rings chess set (£29.99), Polly's Place Hangin' Out House (£24.99) and Sindy's Secret Dreamhouse (£74.99); all among the 18 toys shortlisted by 12 families for the 2003 Hamleys prize for the best toy.

Judging this shortlist and companions were the television presenter Lorraine Kelly; Torquil Norman, the founder of Bluebird Toys; Matt Seaton, Guardian columnist; Libby Purves, Times columnist; and myself, Independent contributor, although my role-playing was, on this occasion, as design guru, a title I have - although I prefer "ideologue" - accepted with what I like to think of as stylish ironic self-deprecation. Still, what is design sensibility to make of today's toys?

Well, it is quite simple. There is a lot of derivative kitsch about. The day of classic toys seems behind us. The greatest toys come from a unique historical moment in the middle of the last century when rising consumer expectations and standards of living and improving technological possibilities provided a fertile environment for entrepreneurs of play to innovate. It seems elegiac that The British Toy and Hobby Association was founded in 1944, perhaps as an optimistic corrective to the horrors and deprivations of war. And it is significant that the greatest toys - let's say Lego, Frisbee, Scalextric and Barbie - had origins in the technical and cultural circumstances of the immediate post-war era.

What became the Lego company was founded by a carpenter called Ole Kirk Christiansen in Billund, Denmark in 1934. It made stepladders, ironing boards, stools and wooden toys. Its first flirtation with celebrity came in 1935, when a coat hanger designed by Dagny Holm enjoyed some success on the Jylland peninsula. In 1947, Christiansen bought a plastic injection-moulding machine as soon as they became available. In 1949 the first Lego Automatic Binding Brick was produced. Lego always had a Scandi-wegian high-mindedness: "We are not driven by profit. Though we are famous for our product, we are defined by our philosophy." The name is from the Danish "leg godt", which means "play well".

In 1958, the current method of brick bonding - with its standardised components and simple but effective peg system - was patented. And for 30 years it was the favourite toy of children of a nerdish disposition, admired by thoughtful adults for its uncontroversial clarity and promotion of motor skills and constructive thoughts.

The Frisbee was different and represents the essence of pure play, but is also witness to a moment in American business history. Richard Knerr and Spud Melin of Wham-O Corporation were masters of consumer psychology who made (sometimes) meretricious fads their business. They introduced inventor Walter Frederick Morrison's metal discus in 1956 and, in response to the decade's UFO crazes and Sputnik adventures, called it the Pluto Platter. But when, in 1959, Knerr and Melin found out that the game of catching a flying disc seems to have originated at Yale in the Twenties, when students started slinging the tin lids of pies from the Frisbie Bakery Company, they ingeniously renamed the product Frisbee. Now there are Frisbee Freestyle Championships. The elemental simplicity of the Frisbee combines with perfect functionality to make an unalterably perfect, timeless design.

Scalextric had its origins in 1952, when Minimodels Limited introduced the Scalex metal-bodied toy racing cars with clockwork motors. In 1956, they turned electric and the distinctive track with its slot-guides was devised. By 1963, Scalextric was creating accurate models of Formula One cars. The better to manage a winning verisimilitude, in 1964 the world champion driver, Jim Clark, was hired as a consultant. The fundamental appeal of Scalextric is based on our fascination with the miniature, enhanced by elements of calamity, speed, competition and triumphalism.

Other philosophical subtleties are found in the notorious Barbie, launched at the American Toy Fair in New York in 1959. Barbie's creator was the Polish immigrant Ruth Handler (who later developed a successful prosthetic breast called Nearly Me). Handler was inspired by Lilli, a sex toy seen in Germany. With glorious incongruity, Barbie has ever since reflected social and sexual mores. Damned by feminists - in fact damned by aesthetes for distorting the imaginations of girls (and boys) with unrealistic expectations of hairless, nipple-less corporeal perfection - Barbie was first found in a racy zebra-striped maillot and stiletto heels. Barbie signalled the end of innocence for dolls. Before the word "date" was immediately suggestive of "rape", one Barbie outfit was called "Friday Night Date" and, in a rare gesture towards liberal opinion, during the civil rights commotions of the late Sixties, Barbie was given a black friend winningly called "Colored Francie".

In one form or another, Lego, Frisbee, Scalextric and Barbie are still with us; sometimes, as with Lego's complex Technik range, compromised in their simple appeal by straining for an awkward contemporary relevance. Scalextric showboated with a Simpsons special edition (which Jim Clark would not have liked). And Barbie is the battered but indomitable victim of the purifying forces of correctness. But they are with us still now and, probably, for ever.

Since then, successful toys have been only temporary fads. The Hula Hoop was typical. A product of the Frisbee team, it was a classic of faddery, but its moment in the sun was a very bright one. The Hula Hoop's popularity was spurred by Knerr and Melin distributing samples, rather in the fashion of drug dealers, in a Pasadena park. Psychologists pronounced that a child feels secure in a circle, making the plastic hoop a metaphor of the family. Pravda, for once correct, denounced it as a symbol of the "emptiness of American culture" and in the year it was launched The Wall Street Journal announced that "hoops have had it". And they had. Next up were Pet Rocks, created in 1979 by an irreverent and bored California ad man called Gary Dahl.

The last toys to cause a sensation before PlayStations replaced imaginative fantasy were the Cabbage Patch Dolls. The creation of one Xavier Roberts, Cabbage Patch Dolls evolved from his anthropomorphic experiments with polyurethane, which produced the Little People dolls. The inert and dopey Cabbage Patch community was, it is clear now, defined in opposition to the first generation of challenging computer games. Gruesomely given birth certificates in the factory, counselling was available to customers needing to change a doll's name. Although at the peak of demand freighters were flying in 200,000 a week, supply could not meet demand for Christmas 1983 and five thousand shoppers at a West Virginia mall rioted. A store official said: "They were grabbing at each other, pushing and shoving. It got ugly." Although at their peak Cabbage Patch Dolls comprised 10 per cent of the entire US toy business, by 1988 computers had won the battle for hearts and minds and the Cabbage Patch manufacturer, Coleco, was bankrupt.

Since then there have been no great toys, but ever more competent computers. Yet toys - or, at least, the idea of play - satisfy one of human psychology's fundamental appetites. The Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga, author of the superlative Waning of the Middle Ages, wrote a less well-known but equally compelling book called Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938). In it, he defines our constant need for the ludic, for playthings: "The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play... We have to conclude, therefore, that civilisation is, in its earlier phases, played. It does not come from play... it arises in and as play, and never leaves it."

The idea that toys are fundamental to civilisation goes back to Plato's Greece, where the words for play and education share the same root. Play, according to educationalists, is defined by being voluntary, motivating, physically engaging and distinct from other types of behaviour. This list is notably low on the pleasure principle: Jean Piaget said children were "lone scientists". Dour educationalists have often neglected the hedonistic aspects of play, rather as the Bauhaus (where forms of play theory influenced the curriculum) denied the prospect of aesthetic delight.

The intellectual study of play and the history of modern design come together in the person of Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel, the creator of the kindergarten. In the 1830s, he developed a construction toy of maplewood blocks. Frank Lloyd Wright was given them as a child by Anna, his progressive mother, who bought them at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial exhibition. Later Wright said: "These maplewood blocks... are in my fingers to this day," and in his autobiography he wrote: "These primary forms and figures were the secret of all effects." Wright's architecture shows the clear influence of this intelligent toy: "Form," he noted, "became feeling." Froebel's toy taught Wright to see, creating a susceptibility to pattern that helped him to become one of the great architects.

It is yet to be proven that computer games will inspire such creativity. But, while today's toys are somewhat impoverished, the universal taste for playthings finds expression elsewhere. Somewhere between a sex toy and an executive toy, the enormous popularity of pick-up trucks proves the adult need for our own playthings. The pick-up cult began in America, just after Barbie. While hippies bought Volkswagens and, later, yuppies bought BMWs, honest-to-God beer-chugging Oklahoma rednecks would buy an F-100, still the best-selling Ford of all time. "Where men are men, trucks are Ford V8s", the ads said. This was reflected by other manufacturers in the names for their own pick-ups, which evoked cowboy fantasies of the sun-baked and gritty South-west: Ranchero, Silverado and El Camino. Like blue jeans, the pick-up was a working-class tool that got re-semanticised.

Today, in Clapham, chromed and shiny Nissan Navaras patrol the streets, their flatbeds untarnished by manure or builder's rubble, offering ludic escape routes to harassed grown-ups. A fundamental part of the appeal of the miniature Smart car is its ineffably darling toy-like character. The popularity of Dualit appliances may be explained by formal and tactile qualities that excite simple, emotional, child-like responses from consumers.

William Cowper wrote this haunting couplet:

Men deal with life as children with

their play

Who first misuse, then cast their

toys away.

But we don't. We all want toys. And while the Nissan pick-up has its devotees, the simplest ones are the best. I am hoping that Hamleys' brave initiative, as it evolves, is going to help to rediscover the essence of successful toys. As a child, I recall that my favourite plaything was a simple frame with a hinged door: this imagination amplifier could turn a sofa into a submarine, a car's back seat into a tank. An imaginative child can turn the simplest object or experience into meaningful play. In his great book, Heavenly Mansions, Sir John Summerson said that a child's enjoyment of simply hiding under a table was the basis of all architectural sensibility. Toys are not dead, but today they take different forms. Frankly, we are playing all the time. It was, after all, that same Shigeru Miyamoto who said: "An adult is a child who has more ethics and morals. That's all."

The winner of the 2003 Hamleys prize will be announced on Sunday