How Kids Learn to Navigate the City (and the World), in Five Designs

In the era of Marie Kondo, the streamlining of our material lives still runs into one big obstacle: parenthood. “To have a child is to be thrown suddenly, and I found rather miraculously, back into the world of stuff,” writes design critic Alexandra Lange in her new book, The Design of Childhood. As Lange and countless other parents discover, you might use a baby-monitor app and have episodes of Peppa Pig on the iPad, but living with children means swimming in a sea of tactile objects—teething necklaces and strollers, play kitchens and board books.

Lange became fascinated by these objects, and by the series of spaces that delimit kids’ worlds as they grow. “I came to see each successive stage of child development as an opportunity for encounters with larger and more complex environments,” she writes. Her book tells the history of designing for children, describing their engagement with the material world in Matryoshka-doll fashion—from toys, to their homes, to schools and playgrounds, and finally to the city around them.