Hold Doll Friend 留住“Doll"朋友

The project Hold Doll Friend is to show the public a new perspective of doll-playing through a series of experience design. Often, people think that playing with dolls is an exclusive children’s endeavor and it is childish to do so. But according to my interviews of many adults, they have important memories of doll-playing and even “play” with dolls continuously throughout adulthood, though with different mindsets; such as treating dolls as learning tools, close friends, fashion models or their secret idols.

I collected 43 stories about people who love dolls and have figured out how they get along with them. I sort their doll-playing approaches into four categories which are very much related to 1) education, 2) social interaction, 3) commemoration and 4) story-continuation.

These four kinds of doll-playing experiences or mentalities are familiar to most of my interviewees. I therefore am inspired to design the following relation-building approaches to let adults and children to play with their dolls together: i) Make Doll friends – a parent-child doll-making workshop; ii) Meet Doll friends – a social media platform to connect like-minded doll friends. iii) Repair Doll friends - a doll repair workshop to recall one’s own memories with dolls; iv) Share doll friends – a donation platform to give old dolls away to those in need so as to continue the dolls’ life-stories.

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