We made the toy our parents would have made us,
if such a thing had been possible in 1985.

I’m an architect, a novelist, and a dad. My six-year-old can turn a cardboard box into a spaceship, a detective’s office, and a wizard’s tower in a single afternoon. One day I started paying attention to that, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The toys I loved as a kid were the ones that didn’t do everything for you. A magnifying glass. A code wheel. A book that asked you to choose. The story was always yours; the toy just gave you the tools.

Ryan O’Connor · Milwaukee, Wisconsin

My two kids both went to Lifeways in Milwaukee, a Waldorf-inspired daycare where I’d pick them up and find one kid stirring a “pot of soup” that was actually a metal bowl with a stick in it, another making coffee out of acorns, another whose stick had been a bat that morning, a sword by lunch, and a truck by the time I arrived. The bugs in the garden weren’t bugs, they were mysteries. I started thinking a lot about what those teachers knew that the rest of us had forgotten.

I grew up in the 80s. Sandboxes. Forts in the backyard. Legos, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys. The toys I loved most were the ones that didn’t do everything for you. A magnifying glass. A code wheel. A book that asked you to choose. The story was always yours; the toy just gave you the tools.

Lantern is a love letter to those toys, and to those Lifeways teachers, made for the world we actually live in now. The objects in the box are real, beautiful, and built to last. The story engine inside the app is powered by AI, not to replace the imagination but to give your child a thousand new starting points. A new mystery every night. A new world every week.

We made it for parents. But the more we tested it, the more we realized: it’s really for whoever happens to be with your child that night. The babysitter who needs something better than the iPad. The grandparent visiting for the weekend. The aunt who shows up for bedtime. Lantern hands them all the same gift \u2014 a script, a scene, and a kid’s face lighting up.

I’ve spent twenty years designing experiences for the world’s biggest brands, helping them tell stories you can walk into. I trained as an architect. I’ve written a novel. None of that was the plan for this. The plan was just to make something my own kids would want to play, and that I would have wanted to play when I was eight, somewhere between the sandbox and the fort.

If we’ve done our job, Lantern is the kind of object you keep on a shelf for years. The kit doesn’t change. The stories never stop.

— Ryan