Words by MPDClick’s Retail Editor.
The Designers Treasure Chest is a new design-education package part of the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 programme, aiming to provide pre-school children with an inspiring and diverse first experience of design.
The workshop based curriculum focuses on what design really entails through play, stories, discussion, invention and getting children to inspect their environment in terms of design. The aim is to find and present ways to enhance an urban habitat as children learn to look at their surroundings in a new way to acknowledge urban construction.
A series of six workshops take children on a journey through the evolution of shoe design; a familar object that every child can relate to. From creating a design map and exploring surfaces and textures that the shoe will encounter to analysing their own shoe, designing a new pair, examining the global manufacturing process and even learning to make a pair shoes.
This new project comes as a natural evolution of education to a nation that is famed for its pragmatic design solutions, encouraging a new generation to become aware and question the world of design that we live in today. We only hope this will spur on similar projects across the world.
The cities of Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Lahti and Kauniainen in Finland are taking up this scheme and implementing it to pre-school children as of autumn 2012.
Click here to find out more information on the Designer’s Treasure Chest.
Image source: Oskari Brinck
-H.T & L.B
