This article explores the possibility of interpreting the Banarasi design worldview of play and toys, as expressed in the Banarasi language in a community of toy designers in India. The author explored the Banarasi concept of play and toy design from the analysis of vernacular vocabulary and etymology from dictionaries, encyclopedias, and oral transcriptions of formal and informal interviews of toy designers, patrons, and shopkeepers. Besides Banarasi, Hindi (a dialect spoken in Banaras), Sanskrit (an ancient Indian language), and English (a language influencing Banarasi) vocabularies were also analyzed. The timeline of various words used to denote toys or their use revealed a pattern of change in the conception of a toy and its physical manifestation. This culture-specific meaning of toys as extended to rituals and ceremonies, their seasonality, and craftsmanship of local materials, broadens the definition of Banarasi khilona (toys) from ludic experience to a cultural representation.

From the perspective of design, Latour's cycles of inscriptions and mobility promises to be of significance to the future exploration of self-organizing tendencies, as well as distributed cognition in decentralized decision making between heterogeneous team members scattered across time and space. Of particular relevance is the role of the artefact in the absence or lack of communication as an object- to-think-with, as well as to negotiate design decisions over time and space. Artefacts, as in this study- Banarasi toys, acting as probes not only accumulate design decisions, but also inscribe the worldview of the members on themselves. Their mutability and mobility endows on them the promising role of gathering members and eventually an entire community around them. On completion of the cycles, they become a microcosm of the worldview, similar to Latour's map encapsulating the earth.