In college, designing cool new playthings
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer ()
With her classmates looking on, Laura Mansdorf pushed around a plastic turtle on wheels. The turtle's shell had been replaced by an ice cream maker that spun around as the turtle moved, mixing ice with rock salt, cream with vanilla.
No crazy inventor she. Mansdorf was presenting her Twirlie Turtle, a creation that would help her complete the requirements for a bachelor's degree in toy design from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York.
"The day of the presentation, I didn't have time to make the ice cream," she says. "I was just praying the turtle would turn the heavy ball at all."
Since graduating last year, Mansdorf, 25, has designed three CSI Activity Kits, two of which have made it onto the shelves of Toys R Us.
"Sometimes, I'll just think of how cool it is that I get to create products for other people to enjoy," she says.
It's a far cry from Santa's workshop, but toy design has become a highly competitive field. Two colleges offer degrees in it, and schools ranging from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia to Columbia College in Chicago have added toy design to their industrial design and arts programs.
With the recent massive recalls of toys made in China and Mexico, would-be toy designers from the United States, whose skills are already much in demand, might soon be entertaining even more job offers.
"We have a 99 percent success rate for placing students in the industry after graduation," says Judy Ellis, who runs the toy-design department at FIT, which started in 1986 as a research project sponsored by Mattel. It was turned into a full undergraduate program in 1989.
Ellis, who used to teach graphic design at Parsons School of Design in New York, says FIT students gone on to work for some of the world's biggest toy companies and inventors groups, such …