Culture-Hacking the Barbie UX

Barbie's Evolution

In the late fifties, entrepreneur Ruth Handler invented the Barbie doll after watching her daughters play with paper dolls. She noticed that they were injecting themselves into the dolls as part of the play experience – personifying the dolls by imagining themselves as grown-ups. Thus was born this iconic aspirational toy (well, that and finding a German doll designed around a similar idea, but that’s beside the point).

Because those aspirations were at the time severely and unfortunately limited by a male-dominated American culture, the doll’s ubiquity became synonymous with the misogynistic environment from which it came. Handler, however, was a master marketer and ironically lived a life antithetical to the symbol she helped create. She was a pioneer in marketing to children, gambling the future of her company on a sponsorship deal with the Mickey Mouse Club – an innovation that paid off for Mattel.

Barbie is one in a list of products born from personal observation. It reminds us that the sources of innovative UX design are all around us all the time – we just have to train ourselves to pay attention. In a more recent example, Deborah Adler came up with the idea for a consumer-centered pill bottle when her grandmother nearly overdosed after taking the wrong medication. What began as a powerful personal observation became today’s Target ClearRx, an impressive (and ambitious) piece of experience design which is now recognized in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Tree Top Barbie

Another sign of enduring UX design is how designed objects and services respond and adapt to the changing culture. Often this transition is not driven by the original creator of the design, but rather by a new layer of innovation that displaces outmoded products – a hack. One of the more interesting ways that Barbie has been coopted is in a product mash-up created by the International Canopy Network, a non-profit group dedicated to creating awareness about the ecological importance of preserving forests. Tree-Top Barbie is a culture hack, designed to “raise consciousness among young girls (and boys!) about the importance of forest canopy organisms and interactions” (ICAN).

Here the icon is subverted to empower young people, challenge conditioned thinking patterns, and raise consciousness about what we are doing to our planet in the process. This hack shows another level of observation of how humans interact with their culture of consumption. Both observations (that leading to the original Barbie and that subverting it) consider what was (the observation) in context of something that was not (the extension, or connecting idea). In the case of the original Barbie, the extension was creating an object that allowed children to freely associate with their fantasy adult-selves – an observed behavior without a symbol. With Tree Top Barbie, the extension was to modify the toy to build awareness for a cause and provide a more positive aspirational model. This observation was more abstract – but nevertheless, the idea was based on a cultural behavior with a gap that needed to be filled.

He Plays with Barbies

If the evolutionary approach to transforming culture isn’t bringing change fast enough, don’t despair. We can always fall back on the more revolutionary Barbie hacks. A quick search uncovered the full gamut of Barbie subversion, including a wide array of beheaded Barbies, a frozen Barbie, Barbie Death Camp and Wine Bistro (an installation at Burning Man, where else?), and Barbie as drumstick  seen at right. DIY culture never starts from scratch.

Sources:
PBS: Who Made America?

ICAN: Tree Top Barbie

NPR: At 50, Barbie’s Accomplishments Impress

MoMA: ClearRx