Book available from SF MOMA Gift Shop
Book available from SF MOMA Gift Shop
Core 77 says:
“Family-owned business Luckey & Luckey designs and builds Luckey Climbers for children’s museums, malls, zoos, and other kid-centric locations that welcome rambunctious rugrats who like to climb, jump, and hang. The net-and-platform structures spell out adventure with playfully curved surfaces and daredevil heights—how could a kid possibly resist? Each installation is unique, ranging from vast, uniform, and structured mazes to vertically-configured jungle gyms.”
My new favorite magazine, Monocle, out of the UK has a photo essay on their site detailing the redesign of a kindergarten in Fuji Japan.
“Architects Takaharu and Yui Tezuka joined forces with Kashiwa Sato, one of Toyko’s most respected creative directors to build, and brand, a novel kind of kindergarten in Tachikawa, a suburban area of Tokyo. Monocle’s Asia Bureau Chief Fiona Wilson reports on the Roof House concept.”
It’s always interesting to see stuff built in other countries that could never be built in the States because we’re so culturally uptight and regulatory in our thinking. We’ve become a nation of claims adjusters.
The New York Times reports:
“Nickelodeon is expected to announce today that Noggin, the daytime commercial-free preschool network, and the N, a nighttime advertising-supported network for adolescents and teenagers, will become 24-hour stand-alone networks and no longer share channel space.”
This is huge news. The marriage between Noggin and the N has always been a bit rickety. By giving the N its wings, Viacom, its parent company, is making a committed play for the tween market. The N’s programming will benefit mightily from this new level of focus, as will its advertising revenue.
Now that the network can sell the valuable before school slots, previously occupied by Noggin’s commercial free pre-school programming, they’ll be able to provide advertisers a level of access not available on Disney, ABC Family or Nickelodeon.
The Times article sites questions by industry analysts over how the N will be able to attract new viewers “by expanding into what are essentially school hours, with reruns of programs including “Drake and Josh” and “The Amanda Show.”
These analyst forget that kids can record shows aired while they’re at school to watch later. What they don’t record, they can watch on the web. Programming is no longer time specific and network driven, it’s fluid and viewer defined. Commercials, product placement and sponsored event based programming will all play a much larger role in the N’s viewer strategies and I expect to see major innovation in all three of these areas.
The assumption that this At School slot will continue to be filled with reruns also misses the fact that the school year is seasonal and broken up by vacation periods. On average, middle school aged kids spend about four and a half months of the year on vacation from school. If the N is smart, which they are, they’ll start developing cheap to produce reality and non-traditional programming based on the themes of their successful primetime shows. These new shows would then be shown in marathon blocks during vacation periods and over the weekends.
The N is also uniquely positioned to dabble in user generated content, given that its target market is among the largest demographic posting videos to YouTube. Now that cross pollination from the tween world’s more explicit content into the squeaky clean pre-school world, will no longer have be a consideration, the N can let loose, to a degree, with how it positions itself to kids.
The best way to do this is to allow the network to become a reflective wall where kids can throw up their video tags, de-contextualize their game avatars and scream their tastemaker rants at each other and the world. To do this the N will have to find a way to become the first cable network to truly bridge the gap between web and television. MTV is trying, but they’ve been stymied by their muddled demorgraphic’s widely varied relationship to the web.
The new N will provide us with our first real view into tweens’ relationship with entertainment. What role will emerging technology play for a demographic that takes it for granted. For a tween there is no experiential dissonance between a show watched on a phone, a laptop or a television. With it’s new position in the market the N has the potential to usurp MTV as television’s bleeding edge. I am extremely excited to see what they come up with.
Computers and computer peripherals for kids are becoming super hot as toy makers come to terms with the fact that parents don’t want their kids icky fingers all over their computers, but still want to provide the crumbsnatchers with a computer and Internet based entertainment. I covered the ClickStart from Leap Frog a while back and now Business Week has an article on some more products that have hit the market.
Mattel has come out with a collection of toys called U.B. Funkeys that plug into a USB based hub and unlock levels in an computer based game. The look and feel of the figures are definitely based on the collectable toy atheistic, which I’m sure was done in the hopes that the toys not only appleal to kids, but to parents “hip” enough to appreciate their design.
You can check out the official site here.
“Soon New York City will be home to a new 6-12th grade public school that will use game design and game-inspired methods to teach critical 21st century skills and literacies. Opening in fall 2009, the school is being created by the Gamelab Institute of Play, a New York City-based not-for-profit organization that leverages games and play as transformative contexts for learning and creativity, in collaboration with New Visions for Public Schools, a not-for-profit organization that works in partnership with the New York City Department of Education to improve academic achievement in the City’s public schools. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently awarded a grant of $1.1 million to help with planning and development.”
Wow… this is the most heartening bit of news I’ve heard in a while. It sounds like the school is still in the beginning stages of developing its curriculum and wrapping up final school board approvals. But, if this goes through and the Gamelab Institute can really make a school founded on the principles of digital game design work, it promises to be a new frontier into the marriage of education and technology.
I wish all involved much luck.
read the Wired article here.
Daniel R. Oakley, the architect & toy maker behind the popular Oliblock buidling system, has crafted an engaging, and quite beautiful, magnetized interlocking gear system for kids.
Mr. Oakley has also designed this colorful magnetic puzzle…
… and a whole bunch more stuff that you can check out here.
The New York Times reports:
“Racing to solidify its dominant position in children’s entertainment on the Internet, the Walt Disney Company said Wednesday that it had acquired a subscription Web site aimed at preteenagers, Club Penguin, in a deal that could total $700 million.”
read the entire article here and check out what TechCrunch had to say here.
“To celebrate the 100th birthday of Charles Eames, Vitra is introducing a limited anniversary edition of the Eames Plywood Elephant, a legendary furniture sculpture that was designed in 1945 but never produced for general distribution and sale. Of the two known prototypes, only one remains in the Eames Family Archives.
Charles and Ray Eames were fascinated by elephants. Many images of these gentle giants are found in Charles’ photographic documentations of Indian culture and the circus world. The Plywood Elephant was designed as a toy for children, but also as a striking sculptural object that makes a statement in any environment with its vigorous curves and delightful character.”
These limited edition pachyderms arrive in November and are sure to go fast. They’re available for pre-order here.
If you don’t want to spring for a big one, they have little ones too.
From Core 77:
“In 1977, the Eames’ made a great movie called Powers of 10. Starting with a sleeping man at a picnic, the film takes the viewer on a journey out to the edge of space and then back into a carbon atom in the hand of the man picnic, all in a single shot.
Today, we can experience Nano Journeys, an interactive tour into the worlds of the micro- and nano-cosmos. Three different tours lets us scale down into the human arm, into a computer processor, or into the LED of a car’s headlight to discover the smallest dimensions of our universe.
The latter journey is part of an information campaign by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to inform the larger audience about the research and everyday impact of nanotechnology.”
I have yet to meet a kid who is not blown away by the magic of scale. Especially, the kind of scale on display in this interesting look into the smaller than small.
The Original
