Kritterville

The "Designing Our World" series has started at the TP Loblaw Boys and Girls' Club with a hoot, a growl and a meow. The critters have taken over the K-club playground. It's up to our young designers to make them a great habitat.

We started with a 2D spacing challenge: turn the K club building and grounds into Kritterville. After picking a creature -real or mythical, the kids started off by drafting a plan. This was a 2D bird's eye view. Every creature needs a good lookout and somewhere to stash their food, so we encouraged the addition of nooks, dens, play perches and play structures, connecting corridors and walkways to define the different domains.

This is a great ape habitat, with exclusive areas for gorillas, chimps, bonobos and orangutans and a shared security gated maze compound on the front roof area. This maze is where the great apes will find their food.

After this landscaping session we challenged the kids to transform their blueprint into a 3D model of their animal habitat.They had to build it from picnic wear -plastic cutlery, foam cups, paper plates, straws and coffee stirrers. Offering a limited selection of found materials to build with makes this modelling task a little trickier. It requires exploration of how the materials connect, flex and balance.

The students experimented with how to join materials in novel ways to shape and stabilize their structure. We asked them to do this with no glue and as little tape as possible to make them think about strength, balance and material manipulation-all critical qualities for architects and builders. Despite the fact that kids love tape, some of them rose to this engineering puzzle!

This is a bird cage, built with interlocking forks and a cup. If you use enough forks it is a very sturdy structure.

This branching sculpture is a play perch for baby pandas. It provides a shaded area to hangout under and gnaw on bamboo as well as several dens extended on branches at the top of the climbing structure.

This lizard cage is part of a rain forest compound built around the school. The design includes the sleeping cage, a water area and a play structure. And interestingly this was one of three groups that included security cameras in their design. 

This kritterville is a home for many different animals. Big cats can lounge on a rooftop terrain and snakes and other reptiles lurk in the shaded area underneath. The large tower is for bugs to scale and is connected to the bird nest compound by a narrow aerial walkway.

Architectural prototyping requires spatial perception, mathematical thinking and basic crafting skills.
 

These workshops are made possible  by the Toronto Arts Council.

Junction Function

 This week's challenge: to reimagine the Bathurst/Adelaide corner. This is a busy intersection close to the Boys and Girls' Club. We asked for a streetscaping feature to animate the sidewalk for pedestrians.

This inventor constructed a  little free sidewalk library out of cardboard. These community book exchanges are popping up all over the city. The book slot is in the front and the blue roof flaps open to reveal an array of slots for storage. This library is also designed to hold small knick knacks for pedestrians to help themselves to.

This designer made a sidewalk drum kit for musically inclined passersby.

This team wanted to put a corner skate deck and parkette. Their design includes a burrowing tube with a skylit garden hub and various interconnecting bridges to skateboard over. 

In this design, there is a multilayered seat and a shelter that doubles up as a wheelchair accessible viewing platform.

 This team are missing Ontario Place, so they designed a play pool with convertible recliner chairs that can be used as mini slides (green), a life guard seat on wheels (yellow) and a dive deck (transparent) with a detachable pod slide (blue).

                    Quite a range of different ideas this week. Well done kids!

City Building

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody..only when they are created by everybody. (Jane Jacobs)

Our imaginary city took shape at Artscape Youngplace's Recess 2 event. City building was an activity devised by the Givins ShawYouth Advisory Group and facilitated by Invention Squad. Our special guests Sipo Maphangoh and Daniel Fusca from the Toronto City Planning office shared insights about city development with the kids and parents.

Before

After

Daniel (right)

Sipo (left)

The first task was to fill the brainstorming centre with ideas for the evolving city:

And then the kids and parents built something awesome:

Community centre next to a park

The all edible restaurant

The gondola connecting different parts of the city together

Sidewalks, walkways and bike paths.

Cats were given pride of place in the city, with two cat play centres and even a cat bus.

Community housing

A concert hall by the lake.

An elevator to a viewing tower

Solar panel roofs on small houses.

Thanks to everyone -young and old- who participated in our city building event. It was fantastic seeing our city grow over time. Invention Squad encourages young people to design cities that work for people of all ages and abilities (and cats of course). 

2nd Community Open House at Artscape Youngplace

Join us for Art * Live Music * Creation * Conversation * Performance * Food & Drinks

Starting @ 4:30 pm

–CITY BUILDING! Drop-in, hands-on kids and family-friendly programming by Invention Squad and the Givins Shaw Youth Arts Advisory Group. What might a city designed by kids look like? 

– Local artist Huda Eldardiry creates a collaborative community mural.

– MAKE YOUR MARK! Help create a massive collaborative wall artwork using colourful self-adhesive vinyls and tapes on the expansive walls and quirky recesses of the Third Floor Hallway Gallery! Inspired by TYPOLOGY‘s current exhibition Flights & Landings

– Artists open studios

Starting @ 6:00 pm
– Community dinner (pay-what-you-can, until 7:30 pm)
– Exhibition Reception: Erratics at the Koffler Gallery, featuring installations by Martha Baillie, and Malka Greene with Alan Resnick (until 9 pm)
– Listening Sessions: A drop-in participatory performance by Victoria Stanton where the audience becomes the DJ, collectively building a eclectic playlist.

Starting @ 8:00 pm
– Live painting with local artist Nick Sweetman
– Designer, curator and educator Zach Pearl gives a talk on the rise of virtual tourism through the lens of popular culture and contemporary art.

Starting @ 9:00 pm
– Live musical performances in the Urban Living Lounge, featuring Charmie Deller, Renee Henry, Odane Taylor, Ramya Am U Than and Niko Young.

AND MORE!

Kids plan Toronto

City-Building is an event designed by kids from the Youth Arts Advisory group at Givins Shaw Public School for everyone in our neighbourhood. It will be run by Artscape resident teachers: Invention Squad.

In this all-ages free family event we will map out and build our giant dream city together from found and recycled materials.

What about:

• An indoor winter-playground with ziplines and waterslides.
• A working farm in a park.
• A street food market-place in an alleyway.
• A transit stop indoor cafe.
• A bike trail connecting all the parks?

Come build with us! Advisors from the city of Toronto Planning Department will be on hand to hear your ideas.

This event  will take place at Artscape Youngplace between 3.30-6.30pm on April 16th as part of the RECESS 2 Open House.  

Designing Play Workshop (pre)

Playground Design: next week we’ll be asking the kids to redesign their own school playground.  

Our typical idea of a playground is maybe something like the play structure on the upper deck (only nicer).  Maybe something like the Trinty Bellwoods playground?  

But we’ll be trying to think outside the box a little.  Our jumping off point could be some of the better play spaces in Toronto: a dynamic playground like the sandpit water area in Dufferin Park Grove, one that incorporates natural features like the slide hill in Corktown Commons one that makes cultural references to its setting- like Canoe Landing Park or a design that employs colour, sound and light like the brand new June Callwood park (check it out down by the waterfront). 

There’s really a world of possibilities when you take inspiration from abroad.  I love the use of recycled tires at the Tire Koen in Japan.  Kids roll/slide/stack the tires and often times the adults get involved too.

Our Invention Squad kids will start off with a scale cardboard platform of the two layered playground at their school.  That’s the constraint.  After that anything goes. We’ll provide recycled paper and cardboard for them to build their fantasy playground. Let’s see what they come up with!

Design-a-thon (2013)

This year, Invention Squad's all day school design event took place on November 22nd.

With help from a bunch of incredible volunteer designers, kids took part in a series of workshops. We made fantastic spaghetti structures, glittered hand-pots, taped cityscapes, up-cycled CD mobiles and school logos.  The idea of Design-a-thon is to immerse the students in a whole day of hands-on, creative activities. One kid described this as "the best day of the whole school year".