Toyi UpdatesToyi is now available at MoMA Design Store!

Toyi, the limitless creative play kit without instructions that enables children to transform everything around them into unique toys, is now available at MoMA Design Store. MoMA Design Store offers curator-approved products that bring quality, creativity, and design innovation to everyday living. Every purchase supports groundbreaking exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a wide range of education programs, and the preservation of the Museum’s collection. Toyi is available at MoMA Design Store Midtown and Soho.

From trash to toys! Children learn up-cycling through play.

The abundance of toys may create a distraction and an overall unsatisfying play experience for children. On the contrary, the toy industry provides a lot of ready-made licensed toys in the market and this approach also affects children’s play experience. With this approach, children get used to consuming. With Toyi, we want to help children to create their own toys with everyday objects using their own imaginative powers. We want them to produce their own content without consuming the ready-made toys. We want children to shift their perspective on consumption from an early age which will have a great impact on the years to come.

With Toyi every kid is a toy designer

With a kit consisting of wheels, feet, eyes, joints, sticks, flexible rings and junction parts, kids aged 6+ can transform any object around them into a toy of their own creation. A water bottle can turn into a rocket, an old box to a train compartment or a pine cone to a cute monster. With Toyi, children can design their toys on their own or along with their friends, improve their creativity by making their dream toys come to life. In this way they become real explorers interacting with their physical and social surroundings, and their inner worlds.

Children need tools that support free play, not instructions!
The play and toy industry is shaped by grown-ups whose creativity is limited compared to children. Play rules are set by grown-ups; they tell children how to play step by step and what toys to make. Even with toys composed of construction blocks, the end product is shown to children beforehand. Toyi is giving priority to children’s needs, and supports free play. There are no instructions or rules in Toyi kits. The entire process is left to kids’ imagination. With the open-ended play experience Toyi provides, children can make a limitless number of toys using their creativity. Toyi reminds parents, teachers, and all grown-ups that child-led play is a great way for children to develop lifelong skills.

21st-century skills improving through play

In an unpredictable and fast-changing world, enabling children to address the challenges of the future is critical. To this end, we need to offer children experiences that allow them to develop their own solutions when faced with a problem, instead of giving them structured materials that tell them what to do step by step. Toyi is designed to ensure that children will use their own imagination to create their own toys, enabling them to develop many skills that they need in this century. As children redesign the materials around them they acquire the up-cycling instinct by producing without consuming at an early age. With the special play experience it provides, Toyi improves the 21st-century skills of children such as problem-solving, critical and innovative thinking, communication, adaptation, cooperation, taking initiative, and help them become more creative, productive, self-confident, nature-loving lifelong-learners.

Toyi is available at MoMA Design Store!

Founded in 2017 in İstanbul, Toyi partnered with ATÖLYE, an Istanbul based transdisciplinary innovation platform the next year. After a successful Kickstarter campaign using the “Buy One Gift One” model in November 2018, Toyi began worldwide sales. And now, Toyi kits will be sold at MoMA Design Store.
Elif Atmaca: “As a young designer, the fact that my work is included in the stores of one of the most prestigious modern art museums in the world is very rewarding to me professionally. I am extremely happy that this product I designed with the purpose of supporting child’s right to play and free play is selected by an institution doing meticulous work in this field and that our message will reach large audiences.”