Abstract: The purpose of this design study is to focus on designing a concept of a contemporary cultural character. The relevant documents and survey on child's play behavior were studied on the following aspects: 1) the concept of toy design, 2) the selection of characters in the literature for toy design, and 3) the character designed by this process. The research instruments were observation form of children’s play behavior, character collection form of Thai literature, and open-ended questionnaire related to cultural play’s notion.

For the result of the study, the researcher had designed a conceptual framework for designing contemporary cultural character, consisting of 6 aspects as follows: 1) promoting children's progress, 2) creating fictional characters, 3) utilizing culture to make inspirations, 4) using body language to create, 5) the ways to select characters from basic virtue, and 6) creating play experiences.

In conclusion, the researcher had designed a new concept for contemporary cultural character by creating hero characters from Thai Himavanta literature. The concept and process of the above research have been applied as an idealized model for creating additional cultural characters for variation of play experiences under a 2 dimensional design concept

Key words: design concept, contemporary cultural character, Thai Himavanta literature