Olivia Kid

Useful information

Team members: Valentina Morandi
Country: Italy
Keywords: product design toy design sustainable circular economy recycle creativity imagination

Short Description

Olivia Kid are natural toys for children made with olive pomace and bio resin.

Detailed Description

Olivia Kid is an innovative design product that pays attention to the stimuli that children need in the age range between 3-5 years. It leaves free creativity without imposing defined morphologies or conditioning an idea or the child's imagination.
Starting from the design of a geometric grid, I developed five characters taking advantage of the pure and only composition of geometric figures such as square, circle and triangle.
After processing the shapes and sizes, I continued with the prototyping phase.
With a tested and calculated dosage of olive pomace and bio resin, the mixture was poured in silicone moulds, made out of previous 3D prints of the shapes of the toys.
Once dried, the toys were extracted from the moulds, smoothed from any edges and painted with water based colors. The five characters are composed of interchangeable heads and bodies with a simple joint formed by the neck, fixed and glued to the head.

Project Details

Does your design take social and cultural challenges and human wellbeing into consideration?: When I started designing the toys, I set myself the challenge of being able to raise awareness of people (especially parents) who choose responsibly to buy a product that is sustainable for the environment and that has an impact on the child's growth. By choosing my project, the child, playing and touching a natural material with his hand, will begin to learn the importance of respecting the environment and the care that one must have of its own things.

Does your design support sustainable production, embodying circular or regenerative design practices?: Sustainable production is one of the main pillars of my project. Indeed, the idea from which my toys take shape is the recycle and reuse of a waste material from the production of olive oil, the olive pomace, placing it in a context where plastic is still very present: children's toys. With the addition of bio resin, I managed not only to create a new materiale but also to fall within the principle of sustainable design.
Currently the prototypes of the molds in which to pour the mixture of olive pomace and bio resin have been made with tools and technologies within reach, but the main objective focuses on sustainable technical production which aims to be part of a circular economy.

Does your design use principles of distribution and open source?: The net is a platform where everything is within everyone's reach. So yes, my project is based on the principles of distribution and open source. I think the sharing of ideas and information is essential to transmit trust both in those who sell and in those who buy, thus creating a bond of transparency and security.

Does your design promote awareness of responsible design and consumption?: My project encourages and supports not only on the principles of slow design but also on those shapes and colors designed specifically to be handed down over time.
As often happens when children grow up, toys are thrown away for their childish representation, accentuated most of the time by their mischievous colors or the sounds they emanate. In my case I aimed to create toys with amorphous shapes not only to release the imagination of the child but to never tire him during growth.?The biggest challenge, and one of my goals, is that my toys never cease to amaze and excite.