Design 21: Social Design Network

Judging Feedback

FIRST PRIZE: Yo'play by Barro de Gast

Monica Förster: Ecology smart – eat up your yoghurt and the reward is a toy – makes it more fun to eat. Will make life easier for all parents worrying about their children not eating enough.
Jean-Pierre Rossie: Yo’play proposes very useful material for construction play, for a large range of ages (2-9 years), for girls as well as boys and in developing countries as well as in consumer societies. This play material doesn't create extra costs to poor families and has little or no cost to the packaging industry – yet it offers an important added play value. A series of simple yet nice yoghurt pots become objects stimulating functional creativity and possibly the making of aesthetic or even artistic creations.


SECOND PRIZE: Bacbucon by Johanna Kiss and Shlomi Friedman

Allison Arieff: A positive spin on garbage. It’s fun and reduces landfill! No easy feat. But seriously, this inventive use of trash is sure to inspire future architects and builders.
Jean-Pierre Rossie: Bacbucon is a really interesting way to use empty plastic bottles available in large quantities in most families or collectible by children. It is suitable for children between age 3 and 12 or even older. This play material seems to be intended for use in pedagogical or youth organizational settings and less for children's free play. It’s an excellent way to recycle plastic bottles but the details given with the project remain unclear about how the joints should be made and what the possible costs can be.
Monica Förster: Sometimes the best toys are what you have in the kitchen drawer – buckets, sticks and bottles – everyday objects that makes children use their imagination.


THIRD PRIZE: Play Packaging by Kate Wells

Monica Förster: When having small children, as a parent, time is a big issue. A fold out ecological time saving playhouse is what I would like to have for my three year-old son.
Jean-Pierre Rossie: Using the cardboard packaging of large household products surely is a way of shaping stimulating play spaces for children between two and four and even older ones. With almost no extra costs the packaging industry could integrate an extra play value to this type of packaging. It remains questionable however how children of poor families in developing countries will be able to use these items as their parents buy the products only rarely or not at all.
Allison Arieff: Kate Wells was smart to acknowledge that for kids there just is no better toy than the box it came in. Her graphic embellishment on the basic structure is hugely appealing as is the ability to recycle it when the child is ready to move on to the next source of fascination – maybe a bigger box!