Hasta La Ideas

The thoughtfully designed Coop line of toys brings us back to a simpler time and place when handcrafted perfection (not mass production) was the method of choice. The rideable bike and 2 trikes are an ecological alternative that combine reclaimed wood with premium hardware – easily constructed right out of the box with a simple allen wrench. Better yet, after the toy has outlived its life, you can send it back to be reclaimed again to build new toys and receive a 10% reimbursement!

Designer: Federico Rios

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(Modern Toys with Classic Crafstmanship was originally posted on Yanko Design)

Related posts:

1. Modern Take on a Classic
2. Modern Twist on the Classic Peugeot
3. Contemporary Crafstmanship

Questo capolavoro fa parte della serie Wood Idols, pezzi unici dipinti a mano da Amanda Visell. Li trovate tutti qui, Mario compreso.

I’m sure that, like me, the vast majority of our readers grew up playing with LEGOs without a second thought about the origin of the beloved building toy. It so happens that 2012 marks the 80th anniversary of the Danish company, and they’ve produced an animated history of the company, which hit the web over the weekend.

The LEGO Group can look back onto an impressive success story: in 1932 Ole Kirk Christiansen founded a production company for wooden toys in the Danish city of Billund. His central idea was, “Only the best is good enough.” The motto stayed, but other than that, a lot changed. The company has moved from the originally small workshop back in 1932, to become the third largest producer of play materials in the world. It is currently represented in more than 130 countries with approx. 10,000 employees. The name “LEGO” comes from the two Danish words “leg” and “godt,” which translates to “play well”…

The triumph of the LEGO Group started almost fifteen years after the foundation of the company, when Ole Kirk Christiansen discovered that plastic was the ideal material for toy production. At the end of the 1940s, the first bricks hit the market, which resemble the modern classic of today. In 1958 Christiansen perfected the LEGO brick with the familiar knobs-and-tubes-connecting-system, which is what the now 3120 different LEGO elements are still based on. LEGO bricks can be combined in an endless variety of combinations in continuously new ways. For six bricks of the same color with 2×4 studs alone, there are 915 million combination possibilities. The imagination has therefore no boundaries.

The 17-minute short, narrated by founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen’s grandson Kjeld, is dense with LEGO’s backstory, yet easy to watch as the animated Christiansen family perseveres through trials and tribulations over the years to build a successful company (IDers might also be interested to see the accurately depicted mid-century machinery).

More LEGO:
» Nicolas Lespour’s Mechanical Engineering Explorations… in LEGO
» Behind the Bricks: Making Lego TV Ads
» LEGO Greenhouse by Sebastian Bergne
» LEGO Store NYC – First Look

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A lot has been done in an effort to make hospitals less of a scary and bewildering place for young children. Remember Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog makeover of a radiology exam room in the Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital in Oak Lawn, IL (below)? That was part of a program sponsored by Kiehls and the nonprofit organization RxArt to make children’s hospitals a little bit friendlier. Personally, I have a hunch that all this hospital room dress-up signifies a more serious flaw in the initial phases of hospital design, and we’d be better served by addressing children’s needs from the very start instead of adding colorful, cartoony band aids long after construction has already been completed.

There are other solutions too, of course. One of the best and simplest approaches comes from Hikaru Imamura, a recent Eindhoven grad who was featured on Fast Co. Design as a notable entry in their Innovation Awards program. Since sick children still have to spend hours, days, weeks etc. being ferried in and out of hospital rooms and from one contraption to the next, Imamura thought it was better to quell their fear by helping them understand what all the big scary machines do, especially since Koons can’t put his balloons dogs in every hospital in the world. Imamura’s solution is a charming and rather refined set of wooden toys that replicate CT scan rooms, X-ray machines and echocardiographs, all staffed by friendly bears.

“I thought it’s more important to make things that attract children’s interest as stuff to play with. As a result, I made toys that had simple devices such as light or sound, instead of representing the details of machines or having high-tech devices.”

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Vancouver-based Wendy Tsao started Child’s Own Studio, a home-based toy design studio with a twist: Tsao doesn’t design the toys. Children do. Tsao’s brilliant insight was to create one-off toys for a child modeled exactly on a drawing done by that child.

[Children’s drawings are] a wonderful expression of childhood [and] the starting point of the collaborative project. Details and color choices are reproduced as closely as possible so that the stuffed toy that arrives in the mail is immediately recognizable to the child who designed it. It’s a fun, rewarding process, and kids love seeing their drawings come alive.

While you can see how it’s do-able enough to create a toy from a drawing by an artistically-gifted child, like these…

…you’ve gotta be impressed when Tsao pulls off the more abstract drawings, like these:

Seeing those latter three makes me reflect, with shame, on times in the past when I received a less-than-clear sketch from the head designer on the job and privately complained about being asked to realize it in CAD. It looks as if Tsao could probably pull off plush Picassos. And with a few hundred creations under her belt and counting, she won’t be running out of business anytime soon.

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