The Afternoon Test
Whatever is still being played with when we pack up is the thing worth making.
The last stage before a piece goes into the range is the least technical thing we do. We put it on a floor with a few children and some other toys, and then we leave it alone and watch what happens over an afternoon.
Almost everything gets picked up in the first two minutes. That tells you nothing — anything new gets picked up. What matters is the second half of the afternoon, once novelty has worn off and the children have gone back to whatever they actually like.
Some pieces come back into rotation two or three times. Some get stacked into something else entirely. And some sit exactly where they were put down at the start, which is a hard result to read about a thing you spent two months on.
We have shelved pieces at this stage that were, by every other measure, finished and good. It is the only test in the process that cannot be argued with, because there is nobody to argue with — just a toy on a floor that nobody picked back up.
