Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Elena Montrasio
Playing is a serious thing, said Bruno Munari,
one of the greatest free thinkers of the last century
and my greatest reference.
I took this sentence literally
and combined it with my past studies in graphics and architecture.
I soon realized, however,
that urban desing and architecture just weren't my cup of tea.
Yet it can’t be a coincidence
that the first toy I thought of, drawn and made
was a city: Archiville.
Archiville is a cardboard city
where every part of this game is a piece of the city.
There is a building, a house, a street, a fountain,
and each piece can be interlocked,
so you can build the city as you like.
The only rule of this game is that there are no rules
but being guided
by free imagination, free creation.
You can put trees on top of houses,
houses on top of rivers, rivers on top of hills.
You can build long, horizontal, vertical archiville,
or compact, piled up ones.
I happened to do many workshops with this game
and it was incredible to see
how so many children built so many different cities.
I remember, during one of these workshops,
a little girl in particular who only used green parts:
trees, hills, mountains, meadows.
And it incredibly impressed her mother, a fervent citizen,
who considered to take her a little more in nature.
Starting from Archiville, I outlined more and more clearly
the principles that guide the design of my toys.
You know,
playing is the first form of learning
through which children, from the very first few months of age,
learn to explore the world around them.
They learn the principles of approach, colours, shapes, weight.
And this both applies to newly invented toys
and also to traditional, existing toys,
where the rules can be changed
to create completely new interactions.
Let's take Domino as an example,
a game we all know - we played with it.
Each card has two ends where there are two numbers
and must be placed next to the same one of another card.
What happens if instead of numbers we put fragments of a drawing?
Imagine, we take the illustration,
divide it into parts, creating small, medium, and large sections,
and these sections are the ones to put along other similar tiles.
By following the rule of Domino,
we are creating new designs, new compositions,
in this case animals, fantastic creatures,
in an exciting, innovative and new visual adventure for children.
From here we created a game on top of an existing game.
Children learn to categorize the world
through icons, universal symbols
that represent buildings, objects, nature, landscapes.
They are able to see, in a red palace with stairs,
the fire house.
A green line drawn on a sheet is the lawn.
This is an incredibly important principle
that distinguishes toys that I call innovative and stimulating
from what I call static puppets.
A definition that doesn't imply any judgment:
they are just made-and-finished products
that represent the superhero of that moment
or the character of a cartoon,
or Barbie.
They are perfectly crafted products,
but they do not create any kind of elaborate interaction.
They're perfect for what's called a symbolic game of fiction –
for example when you're carrying two dolls around,
or when Superman fights against the monster.
Well, I don't design that kind of toy.
I try to remove as much as I can from my products,
let's say, I design incomplete products.
You need the magic of the game, of the child
who through their actions, by playing this game,
can complete the object, complete the product,
make it real, make it alive.
For example, "Cavalcade"
this collection of rocking animals that you see behind me,
it's made from a single board of wood
cut into various parts, then colored,
and it defines a series of animals.
They are not real animals,
more than depictions of animals, they are icons.
So the giraffe can be understood because it has a long and yellow neck,
the zebra because it has black and white streaks,
even if it is the same size and shape
as the horse.
Has it ever occurred to you. "Children live in a world of adults"?
Enzo Mari told us about it:
and that's why they need
a world to their size and measure,
with which they can compare, get to know each other and learn.
And so toys become the perfect tools for them to learn.
They are objects exactly made
with a language that fits them, their size.
During the construction of a kindergarten,
the architect decided to invite his clients
to a visit, in this case the children.
Excited and delighted
with this incredible adventure they were about to embark on,
they pointed out to the architect
that they could not see outside from beneath their classrooms:
The windows were too high.
Ever considered?
I wanted to play with this difference in scale
in the last major project, in every sense, that I made:
Animal Factory
is a collection of animals made of full-scale steel tubes,
representing different animals.
These are things to put in schools,
in public parks, in cities, in fitness areas.
They are objects that invite different interactions.
You can hang up, you can swing,
you can sit down, you can tie up your bike,
you can get a full workout.
They can also become meeting points.
Imagine how nice it'd be
to meet up "at the giraffe" or "at the crocodile".
For the first time
I’m dealing with the fact that I’m not only a designer,
but also a parent of a little Galileo.
He is a little over a year old,
and I’m critically observing
that he’s equally attracted to the toys
that we consider creative and stimulating,
as well as to the more commercial, senseless toys.
I wonder how important it is
to present more than one another
and I firmly believe that it is very important to give
those that stimulate the child's imagination.
It's certainly not the material that determines it.
So I wonder why we,
parents who consider ourselves modern and attentive to these principles,
persist in buying beautiful wooden products
that cost much more than plastic ones.
I think the answer is:
because it's really important to educate children about beauty.
To the beauty in the juxtapotion of color forms.
To the beauty as the sound of materials,
tactics,
composition
and design.
Along the same lines,
I wonder what the boundary is, as the child gets older,
between analog and digital,
between the games we adults choose
and the ones he child will want instead.
They had seen them on TV,
or they are inspired by cartoons
or saw one of their classmates.
I’m sure that absolute impositions are never positive.
As in everything, you need common sense and balance.
What is important for us parents and planners
is not to live on a different planet, far from reality, but being here today
and able to answer their questions.
One of the many current sensitive issues
is certainly that of the body shape,
diversity, identity, inclusion.
I think it is right and very important to
educate children about these issues even through play,
to teach them acceptance, respect and acceptance.
I’d like to end my speech with the last game.
It's a memory game called "we're all equal."
It’s not a traditional memory,
where identical tiles have to be paired.
It's a different memory because it’s about body parts
and it emphasizes diversity.
Again, you don't have to look for two identical tiles,
but two similar ones,
and so there are two hands,
one with dark skin and one with light skin.
There are two ears, one with an earring, one without.
There are two legs, one has prosthesis and one has a scar.
And then there are also four tiles that represent the private parts.
Why four?
Because I believe that now, in 2022,
it’s right and important to educate boys and girls
that liberties that do not harm others must be considered a right
and that there is not right or wrong.
Don't you think?
(Applause)