Serious Fun!: Work & Play with Charles & Ray Eames

Gr 3-6–In an ambitious attempt to expose young readers to “design thinking”—the concept that every work of art and consumer product starts with recognizing a need or problem and then moving through stages from “define” and “ideate” to “implement”—Hale (Out the Door ) pays tribute to the creative couple responsible for a envisioning a surprising amount of what we still wear, see, use, and sit on. Following the two subjects from age three, when they were already showing artistic leanings, Hale leaves most of the biographical specifics to the afterword to focus on their process, and the spirit of playful experimentation that informed it. So, backing up select pithy quotes (“Toys and games are the prelude to serious ideas,” “Let the fun out of the bag,” etc.) and descriptions of select works, the illustrations—which are done in a period style reminiscent of mid-20th century advertising art—offer scenes of the two putting heads and hands together and then to issue a seemingly infinite stream of fresh, distinctive projects ranging from architectural and fabric designs to films, interactive exhibits for IBM and other clients and, perhaps most famously, cheap, practical splints, racks, and chairs made from bent plywood and wire. “Eventually,” Charles wrote, “everything connects—people, ideas, objects.” The work suffers in comparison with James Yang’s livelier Designers at Play, as it fails to present any convincing reasons why younger readers should know who these talented people were and why we should know about them.