Paper Plane Academy - bullseye!
Image: Claire Ropartz
Source: JONESCHIJOFF
The State of Design Festival is in full swing across Victoria, including some special events for kids at Melbourne Museum.
On 18 July, the Paper Plane Academy flew into Melbourne Museum for some serious playtime. Over the course of the day, around 120 participating kids and their parents designed, tested and refined their own paper aeroplanes in an aerial playground supervised by a character called Air Marshal Fuselage.
The Paper Plane Academy was created by JONESCHIJOFF, a Melbourne industrial design consultancy. Co-founder Michael Chijoff said that the workshop reflects the company’s interest in encouraging the next generation of designers. Using the paper plane – an icon of creativity, mischief and joy – utterly engaged the kids and their carers. “As an adult, you don’t often get the chance to play like that,” said Michael. The participating kids received a pilot’s Licence to Fly complete with their own photograph, plus a Mission Briefing containing further paper plane challenges to take home.
Another museum festival event, presented by Artillery Interior Architecture on 19 July, was My Patch, My Future City. In this event, kids received a ‘patch’ of Melbourne on which to build a model sustainable structure from a variety of recycled materials collected by Artillery over the past months – including carpet samples, wood scraps and tubing. “The parents provide the project brief, and the kids’ imagination takes care of the rest,” said Sonja Duric, who works with Artillery. She was one of several professional designers assisting the construction of a future Melbourne, as imagined by the participating junior designers. After reassembling the patches, the spectacular model city included an underwater research facility, a house inspired by fractals, a sustainable train station, and a geodesic dome with a water catchment and passive solar lighting.
Both events were initiated and hosted by professional designers in their own time. They also relied heavily upon their sponsors for the raw materials needed to stage the activities, which illustrates the community focus of the State of Design Festival.
The 2009 theme of the State of Design Festival is ‘Sampling the Future'. First held in 2004, the purpose of the now-annual festival is to celebrate the value of design, which is defined broadly as anything planned or constructed with a specific purpose or function in mind. The festival runs until 25 July 2009.