Although wooden blocks are a great stimulant for a child's imagination, one of their limitations is that they fall down when extended construction us attempted. This can be great fun for kids who enjoy knocking things down, but for strange experimental construction, they should be able to be stuck together in some way. Leggo does this in a limited way, but if imaginative variations on wooden blocks have small velcro circles glued to them over their surfaces, somewhat more permanant structures can be attempted. Also, instead of wood, the blocks can be made of soft foam plastic to make them into less dangerous toys. Another variation is that the shapes could be made very large so that small "houses" into which children could hide and play could be made on the same principle.
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After submitting this it occurred to me that it would be fun to have a large piece of furniture for a kid's room like a sofa or a large armchair made of soft block components held together with velcro strips or large dots that could be pulled apart by kids and re-assembled into small structures that kids could hide in or crawl through or make up imaginative games in.
I'm not sure there isn't something like that out there already but I sure know my youngest would be building forts and dog houses and castles and spiderholes out of soft furniture that could be reconfigured. How about blankets with velcro at the corners and/or edges for spanning across parts of the furniture. Of course, there may be more for a young mind to learn from building such things out of available materials (tables, chairs, books, blankets, cushions, pillows) than from items designed to make the process easy. Still, I like the idea.
As an interior designer focused on healthcare and institutional projects,I've fostered the idea of blocks designed so that they can be flip-flopped from 'tables' for toddlers into 'seats' for pre-schoolers and wedged together for other purposes (i.e. caves, constructions, etc.)Instead of velcro, magnets might work to limit how high a construction project could go.While this was institutional in inspiration, perhaps there is a more day-to-day home application.I'd like to see this tied to the idea of recycling all that home-grown kids plastic under Product Containers Becoming Toys.
Hey that's a really cool idea! I have this really big box full of 2X4 scraps from basement construction that my kids play with. I'm going to get some velcro and try it out.