Children's Sizes - Design for kids

An exhibition of selected design by Icelandic and international designers who have influenced design for children as well as influenced the children's world or environment.  The emphasis is on three dimentional design, toys and furniture, particularily objects that are user friendly for children and designed with their special needs and ideas in mind. A large part of the exhibition will be a designated workshop where children and other guests can create their own designs on the walls of the museum as well as an interactive room with toys such as wooden speedster or racer cars.
The oldest design on display will be from the early 20th Century but the latest one will be specifically made for the exhibition by three young designers who are creating new designs sponsored by the Aurora fund. The exhibition is in collaboration with many different museums, shops and individuals such as The Museum of Design and Applied Art, Epal Design Shop and the Iceland Academy of the Arts. Furthermore students from the Academy have worked on a special project just for this exhibition. The exhibiton will also be a part of the Design March event held in Iceland between 18th - 21st of March. The curator is Tinna Gunnarsdottir who is a product designer.
A program around the exhibition will include workshops, guided tours, art talks and seminars. See the program here 


Children´s Sizes
Design for Children words from the curator: 

The thought-world of children is complex and has been a fount of stories and fairy tales since time immemorial. It seldom takes much to get a child’s imagination going, as is evidenced by the favorite Icelandic toys of yore, animal bones, horns, and teeth that did yeoman’s service as birds, mammals, and monsters.

Jónas Hallgrímsson‘s fairy tale Bone and Shell tells the story of a shank bone that courts a shell as they lie together in a boy’s toy chest. The shell feels that the bone is not worthy of her; she, being from the sea, was of a better sort. The bone, however, gets its due when the following takes place:

Now the boy who owned the toy chest came along, took out the bone, wound a red thread around it, and galloped it around the loft. Next he took a copper tack and drove it into one end of the bone, and that shining tack didn’t look half-bad, as the bone galloped around.

It is a great challenge to design for the capricious world of childhood, to enrich a child’s imagination and promote development through the aid of material objects. The old story of the bone and shell may seem foreign today, but in fact all children go through a phase of turning over furniture and transforming it into unknown worlds. The quantity and variety of available toys matters little, then; youth’s creative power, its impulse to see things in a new light, endures.

In selecting objects for this exhibition we paid special regard to objects that work with and encourage the open and creative spirit of youth, rather than tying it down to static notions. A tree becomes a clothes stand, a bird a hanger; fish bones become wondrous beings. We are in territory that Manfreð Vilhjálmsson and Dieter Roth explored in 1959, when they used a buoy as the seat of a stool for the youth club Lídó.

When objects are jumbled from their usual surroundings and taken out of context, they gain a new purpose; new potentials form. This is exactly what every child does unconsciously throughout its development. What an artist does as a deliberate matter a child does through its natural instinct to grow, learn, and understand.

Patterns of child behavior have inspired many a designer. Examples abound of furniture designed to be easily tipped over onto every side. A seat changes into a table, the table into a highchair, the highchair into a cave, the cave into a fort, or something else entirely. Thus the Spanish-British design group El Ultimo Grito followed imagination’s lead in designing its chair-toy Mico, which means monkey in Spanish. The Monkey may be used as a chair or drawing table, or upturned, rocked, or ridden like that shank bone of old.

The present exhibition includes both Icelandic and international design, but one of its main goals is to examine the work of Icelandic designers. A large part of design in Iceland has been furniture and toys created by designers, architects, and artists for their own children; little has been publically manufactured. Thus the older objects in this exhibition have not been widely shown in public, making this exhibition a unique opportunity to become acquainted with little-known works by otherwise well-known creators. The exhibition also bears witness to the energy that has distinguished Icelandic design in recent years. The works of younger designers have more often been publically manufactured; several examples of those works are on display here. Most of the selections from abroad are by well-known designers who have influenced Icelandic design or who work along parallel lines, thus placing the Icelandic objects in an international context.

Three young designers have created original designs for this exhibition, taking on the task of designing for children. They have had a free hand in choosing their approach to the project, and the results of their work may be seen in the exhibition and also outside the museum. Participating designers are Hanna Jónsdóttir, Haraldur Civelek, and Ragnheiður Ösp Sigurðardóttir.

Students in product design at Iceland Academy of the Arts have also participated in this exhibition, designing and building soap-box cars inspired by the thought of three world-renowned designers. Young museum guests may explore the cars’ capacities in test-drives around the museum. The exhibition will therefore be divided into a conventional gallery area where objects are displayed and annotated with text and artist information, and a second area in which guests of all ages can try out the objects. A further portion of the museum will be devoted to a workshop where guests can use the inspiration provided by the exhibition in making their own creations.

It is fitting to give the last word to the Italian artist and designer Bruno Munari (1907-1998). He devoted much of his career to children, who were an endless fount of ideas to him. Children’s curiosity, emotional sensitivity, and dignity sparked his interest, as well as their endless experiment in turning the world upside-down. Munari not only cherished children themselves but believed in the importance of cherishing the child in every person.

By keeping childhood close to your heart all your life, you preserve the curiosity that leads to knowledge, the pleasure that follows upon understanding, and the desire to pass it along.

Tinna Gunnarsdóttir, Curator


Names of the designers who have work on display:
Icelandic designers:
Dagur Óskarsson http://www.daguroskarsson.com/
Dieter Roth
Guðmundur Kr. Kristinsson
Gunnar Magnússon
Katrín Ólína Pétursdóttir http://www.katrin-olina.com/
Manfreð Vilhjálmsson
Mundi http://www.mundivondi.net/
Ólafur Ómarsson
Óli Jóhann Ásmundsson ojadesign.is
Róshildur Jónsdóttir www.hugdetta.com
Stefán Snæbjörnsson www.hugdetta.com
Vík Prjónsdóttir http://www.vikprjonsdottir.com/
Þórdís Zoega http://thzoega.vortex.is/
Hugdetta www.hugdetta.com
Guðlaugur Valgarðsson
Lóa Auðunsdóttir http://voluskrin.is/
Ingibjörg Hanna Bjarnadóttir http://www.ihanna.net/ 
Ragnheiður Ösp Sigurðardóttir http://www.umemi.com/
Sigga Heimis http://www.siggaheimis.com/
1st year students in product design at the Icelandic Academy of the Art

International Designers:
Eero Aarnio http://www.eero-aarnio.com/
Nanna Ditzel http://www.nanna-ditzel-design.dk/
Charles & Ray Eames http://www.eamesgallery.com/
Hella Jongerius http://www.jongeriuslab.com/
Mogens Koch http://www.mogens-koch.com/
Michael Young http://www.michael-young.com/
Maartje Seenkamp
Ole Petter Wullum
Company / Aamu Song http://www.com-pa-ny.com/
Satyendra Pakhalé http://www.satyendra-pakhale.com/
El Ultimo Grito http://www.eugstudio.com/

Innovation projects designers:
Hanna Jónsdóttir www.hannajonsdottir.com
Haraldur Civelek www.icomefromreykjavik.com
Ragnheiður Ösp Sigurðardóttir http://www.umemi.com/