Children will build the world of tomorrow. A world that could be very different from the world that we live today, due to the environmental crisis of the last decades.
The course “Come on Kids! Play with Climate” contributes to the education of designers able to work against what Indian writer Amitav Ghosh has described as “The Great Derangement”. The course’s main goal is to design tools for the future generation, tools that will allow them to imagine their coming future – and thus to imagine alternatives, solutions, possibilities we can’t see today. Using tools of graphic design and visual communication – and reflecting upon design ability to build worlds and foresee future scenarios – the idea is to design “playful situations” for children and kids in order to make them see, interact and question their coming future.
A “playful situation” is an activity or a game able to encourage children’s creativity, enhancing the participation process rather than the final outcome. In the specific, these situations should help then to imagine – and to get familiar with – environmental and social scenarios which are very different from those we know today. Each student realized an activity or a game – board games, role-playing games, playful installations, interactive environments, street games, etc. – that contains within it a reflection or a reference to global warming and the climate crisis.