Child’s Work

A hat to soothe crying children, light-sensitive swim goggles, and shoes that simulate walking on air are all part of Fantasy Design, a traveling exhibition of international schoolchildren’s first forays into design education, which culminates this October at the Lighthouse-Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and the City, in Glasgow. The exhibition is the public-relations arm of a three-year intensive program of the same name, formed to highlight the benefits of beginning design education at an early age.

Through the cooperation of European schools and their museum sponsors, students from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Scotland were able to spend class time inventing products under the supervision of design professionals. “Children often think it’s completely far-fetched that they could become designers,” says Lesley Riddell, manager of education at the Lighthouse. “Meeting professionals in person—especially those who are in some cases only fifteen or so years older—made that exciting goal feel like an attainable one.” In addition to bringing professionals into the classroom, participating design companies—including the Finnish companies Fiskars, Verso Design, and Arabia—set up factory and studio visits for the children.

Forty percent of the funding for the project was generated as part of the EU’s European Commission cultural programming, which aims to promote creativity and the arts throughout the region. The rest was provided by art institutions in each of the five participating countries; Finland’s Design Museum served as coordinator on the program, in cooperation with Belgium’s Design Museum Ghent, Norway’s Norsk Form, Scotland’s Lighthouse, and Denmark’s Hindholm Socialpaedagogiske Seminar-ium. These institutions recruited designers—such as Sari Anttonen (Finland), Katty Barac (Scotland), Tore Brustad (Norway), Niels Peter Flint (Denmark), and Dirk Wynants (Belgium)—who could explain their work and the step-by-step processes they used to create it with the teachers as well as the students. The designers led an international seminar in Norway on how to speak about design principles so that the teachers could supervise the students, with regular guidance from the professionals, in crafting “prototypes” of their own.

At the end of the school year an international jury of education and design specialists from each country selected 65 student works to be included in the traveling exhibition—not necessarily because they were the best or most marketable but rather because they spoke most to the educational process. “The exhibition is helping to introduce a new kind of discussion about design,” says Leena Svinhufvud, educational curator at Design Museum. “It’s important not to see it just as a high-minded cultural thing. Fantasy Design offers the chance to see products and environments as something anyone can work with.”