Magic Dollhouse

e and sometimes in close quarters with another friend, dollhouse play is a precious tableau where dolls are told quiet stories and decisively moved from room to room by little fingers. I will present a new kind of dollhouse, a dollhouse that not only can be decorated but can be easily rearranged to suit new stories and new dreams. What was once a wall can now be a doorway. A stairway to the second floor can instead lead to a balcony. My reinvented dollhouse appeals to the little architect in every child with its simple components and its easy to understand arrangements. Specifically, I have painstakingly designed a small set of barebones dollhouse rooms in a CAD program. From these designs I laser cut sets of standardized walls, floors, ceilings, and other architectural elements which are then permanently assembled into separate room components. A deceptively simple arrangement of tabs, hooks, and slots allows children to easily snap together rooms into personalized dollhouses. At the Seattle Mini Maker Faire I will cover a table with a mishmash of dollhouse rooms and let children go to town: assembling, taking-apart, and re-assembling new kinds of dollhouses. And of course I will also have a few dolls scattered about to inhabit these emerging constructions. I am excited to see what aspects of my 1.0 design works and what parts frustrate or fail under real-world usage. I and a volunteer or two will also have scrap paper and crayons for kids to draw and record their wish lists of new kinds of rooms and components. I will provide stools so that wee ones can reach the table. If there are vertical surfaces (walls) at the back of the booth, I will create poster sized explanations of the process and future plans. Space-permitting, I will have a DVD player showing a continuous looping video of how kids can rearrange the rooms. If the organizers permit (and with parental permission), I'd also like to take pictures of kids with their creations, mementoes that can live past the ephemeral constructions of a frantic weekend festival.