Sparks Resources - Distributed Design Platform

Useful information

Team members: Inês Munday
Country: United Kingdom
Keywords: Innovation Growth mindset Creative confidence Collaboration Adaptability Customisable Education

Short Description

Innovation to enable children to retain and strengthen creative and diverse mindset and values.

Detailed Description

As we learn best through exploration and doing, and by designing our own environment, Spark is embedded with the belief that products and spaces should incorporate creative and open-source practices for fairer, more sustainable living.
Customisable and adaptable, to support and encourage a sense of community, agency, place, and belonging from an early age. Nurturing a deeper understanding of the power of individuals and communities, as well as that of diversity in all its forms.
Marrying existing educational products, like concrete resources, and educational furniture, encourages the practice of analogous thinking, facilitating teaching and play, beyond the traditional narrative of a chair. Enabling exploration of metacognition and developing design thinking approaches.
Stool, turn chair. Stackable or stored under desks, enables flexible learning spaces. Has enough resources to teach STEM subjects, as well as play but encourages collaboration to make larger, more elaborate structures.

Project Details

Does your design take social and cultural challenges and human wellbeing into consideration?: Innovation as the art, science and process of solution finding, is key to tackling the many global challenges the generations of today and tomorrow face. Creative and diverse thinking is key to that, yet Art and Design subjects continue to be undervalued in educational and social systems.
The approach of this project has been to design and innovate product solutions that enable, value and support creative and diverse thinking, by looking at the re-design of classroom and home-schooling products, that can support children to retain, as well as strengthen a creative and diverse mindset and approach, to adapt and create a new, for the social, cultural and environmental changes we so desperately need.
The value of the functional education we receive can only be truly unlocked and made transformational when applied and investigated in a creative and diverse mindset and approach, that not only bridges existing understandings and knowledge but that pushes and breaks the boundaries too. This is a driver behind the Sparks Resources design, in support of better incorporation in education of the development of interpersonal, cognitive and system skills. Also creating and enabling a sense of community, agency, place and belonging from an early age, to empower us more fully to understand and embrace the power of individuals and communities, as well as that of diversity in all it’s forms.

Does your design support sustainable production, embodying circular or regenerative design practices?: Through reusable and recyclable materials such as ABS, metal, wood and PLA Sparks not only aims to create and be part of a more cyclical material and consumption system, it embeds the passion and belief that our products and spaces should incorporate open source practices to enable repair, adaptation and replacement, for fairer, more sustainable living.
The seat itself is designed for injection molding for more efficient material use and consumption as well as to make it more affordable and accessible.

Does your design use principles of distribution and open source?: The Sparks resources design and philosophy has been initially implemented into a stool design for children, in which elements allow for local production, customisation and adaptation by schools, parents, and more importantly children, through the use of open-source systems and approaches, such as the provision of shared design. Teaching children making and CAD skills through the use of 3D printing and free resources such as TinkerCAD. The rods are made of hardwood, also providing the opportunity for basic woodworking material and skills introduction too. Wood that can be sourced locally through local small businesses and craftspeople.

Does your design promote awareness of responsible design and consumption?: By teaching the value of materiality, sustainability and the joy of making and adapting at an early age, we can tackle future consumption and design systems and processes.
Delivering confidence and knowledge to adapt and change the world around us with local and shared resources is key to our social, cultural, and environmental approaches too, to the future of people and planet. That is a key aim of the Sparks design products and system.