This project explores the possibility of digitally curating toys manufactured during Cold War Hong Kong. Being a part of everyday life, seemingly innocent daily objects can display diverse forms of agencies in interaction with humans (Robles, 2024). The same certainly extends to toys, as "distinct forms of furniture, clothing, and playthings evolved in response to adult perceptions of children’s changing needs" (Brandow-Faller, 2018). While global childhood studies have emphasised upon impacts of historical events on childhood experiences, and shifting notions of childhood over distinct cultures and time, toys remain understudied as a form of material culture acting as a conduit between individual children, the wider community and the "adult" social spaces that children are expected to grow into. Curiously, Hong Kong's recent history as a capital of toy manufacturing has also received less than due academic attention. Many of the extant publications concerning Hong Kong's toy industry history are published from an angle of hobby collection (Chan, 2017; Yeung et al., 2017), or through the lens of business history (Monks, 2010), leaving out significant gaps in the material culture of childhood, and socioeconomic histories.

A history of toys from Hong Kong, focusing on using toys as material agents that show stories of socioeconomic development, commercial trade and technological exchange, cannot be complete without faithful renditions of playing and making. Just as importantly, accessibility, particularly with the hindsight of the global COVID-19 pandemic, proves the value of interactable virtual archives to maintain public education and research access in times of crises. Reviewing extant projects covering historical childhood in East Asia, the Hoover Institution's multimedia project, Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan demonstrates a valuable example to preserve access to experiencing past childhood material cultures, informed by historical context, in an interactable virtual format.

With these elements in mind, I propose the creation of a project dedicated to digitally curate toys made in Cold War Hong Kong, embedded within the context of Hong Kong's postwar developments, and provides historical contexts of technological transfer, capital flow, to the evolving consumption of Hong Kong-made toys as they gain global renown. I also aim to categorise individual toys by theme and manufacture materials, demonstrating evolving socioeconomic circumstances and manufacturing capabilities, in conjunction to downloadable 2D/3D scans of toys for object lessons, with an option of virtually playing with the toys through online UIs, or at minimum, a video recording showing how to operate a toy.

Bringing this early-stage project into this conference, I aim to discuss questions including but not limited to the following: Many toy companies in discussion still exist, and may hold copyright over their products. To what extent can this project allow educational access to replicate toys that may be private intellectual property? Moving on from legal issues, technical problems also abound. On a spectrum of accessibility and granularity, what considerations should be taken when conducting scans of toys? Compared to extant 3D replication projects, such as Mark Olson's Interactive Archive of Historical Medical Technologies, and the Virginia Commonwealth University's Virtual Curation Laboratory, what possible issues might 3D scanning processes face, such as brittleness of scanned objects, or the extent to which materials and paints could be replicated?