Focus on children's perspective

Children are the future of humanity. To be child-friendly is to be friendly to the future of the city. In recent years, Shenzhen has dedicated itself to the construction of child-friendly cities and released the country's first local standard for child-friendly city construction, "Guidelines for the Construction of Child-Friendly Public Service Systems," on May 25 of this year. "Child-friendly cities should meet the curious, exploratory and aesthetic psychological needs of children." Zhang Bing, founder of OADstudio Original for Awakening, said, "As a designer, I think I have the obligation and responsibility to help society through my profession, to pay attention to the aesthetic education of the youth group, and to help more parents focus on improving the aesthetic quality of young children, so that they have the ability to feel beauty, appreciate beauty, express beauty and create beauty and a healthy aesthetic attitude. "

"In children's aesthetic education, art education plays a pivotal role. I hope to use this as a starting point to help children perceive beauty from point to point so that they can in turn use the new things they perceive to create their own unique beauty." Zhang Bing said. With this in mind, she used the theme "Listen to the Blossoms" to create the visual design for the PEACEART International Youth Art Competition to be held in 2021. For the theme of the competition, "PEACE," she used the graphic design of letters, evolving them into different forms of peace doves, and then combining them into a colorful graphic of blossoming flowers, overflowing with hope and enthusiasm for life. In terms of colors, she chose colors that meet children's aesthetics based on their perception of the world, such as yellow for enthusiasm, white for tolerance, green for life and purple for peace.

"Vibrant colors not only enhance children's curiosity, but also give them strong sensory stimulation and mental pleasure." In her opinion, children's growth is like a small flower that will go through the process of germination, growth, budding and blossoming, and the whole process needs the devoted accompaniment and love of parents. As parents, we must learn to listen to their murmurings, to their every exclamation and happy laughter in the face of the new world.

For children, school is a second home in the process of growing up. What kind of school is better for children's growth? "Free, open and pleasant" is the answer given by Jing Xie, the founder of I11 Architects. In China's traditional campus (especially elementary school) construction, it is often simply enclosed by walls from the city, like a closed box isolated from the world. "Walls represent fragmentation and rejection." In Xie Jing's opinion, "children's growth and education cannot be isolated from the city. I hope that by creating a pleasant and free campus space, I can protect the spirit of children's free exploration, stimulate their internal drive to understand the world, and promote the formation of a virtuous cycle of co-building, co-education and sharing between school and society."

Xie Jing's "opening the school box" is a useful attempt of Xinsha Primary School. "Removing" is the first step to "open". By removing the walls, the big pagoda-style doors, and the classrooms with too high windowsills, she eliminated their negative experiences and rebuilt a softer and more interesting campus space. One of the key moves was to eliminate the walls by borrowing a podium on the first floor of the campus. The podium was built as a Lingnan-style riding tower, and the former student activity space was raised to a large platform on the second floor; the platform overhangs 3m on the west side and 4m on the south side to prevent climbing and allow students to observe the city from a comfortable height with an open view. Underneath the overhang, the rider and the sidewalk share a storm corridor, and the traditional school gate becomes a "zigzag" entrance accordingly, forming a three-dimensional pocket park shared with the community and bringing the campus closer to the city to the greatest extent.

In detail, the recessed flower pools on both sides of the second floor platform edge railing are planted with weeping vines, which become a landscape shared by the school and the city, and also add a buffer between the upper campus and the lower city, making the line of sight safer and the boundary softer. Above the second floor, the double-sided corridors and balconies open up the floor into a space for both teaching and activity; the classroom bay windows are inspired by "floor-to-ceiling windows" and lower the height of the solid walls, allowing first graders to sit indoors and look out the windows; the balcony outside the bay windows is transformed into a nature classroom for growing flowers and raising small animals. Extension. Entrance paths, alley spaces, rooftop farms, triangular hills, green forests and various interactive landscape installations are distributed throughout the campus, forming "playground" spaces with different themes, allowing children to learn, communicate and grow while playing.

The "opened" Xinsha Primary School is no longer a school in the traditional sense, but a space for community interaction and sharing: the riding building becomes a good place for residents to take a cool stroll; after school, students call their friends to chat and write on the stone benches under the riding building; the small square under the tree pillar at the entrance of the school becomes a community activity center, where residents play badminton, exercise, and dance after dinner. After dinner, residents play badminton, work out, and jump rope. "It has always been our hope to create soft, wild landscape architecture and to dissipate the tensions of urban life through community creation." Xie Jing said, "As urbanization develops and urban life becomes more and more efficient and regulated, public buildings should be more responsible for pleasant relaxation and free liberation, which can be guided by the design of physical space. Schools are essentially an important public cultural building, and so should they be."

As an important public cultural life center, how should the design of the book city be better adapted to the needs of children? Shenzhen Book City Longhua City's lead designer, Darwin Lu, brings thoughts on people and space, space and emotion, nature and humanity, with a view to enlightening children's creativity through space creation. "The Children's Fun Pavilion is a marketplace for children in the book city. We hope to create a paradise in children's hearts from their sight." The design team implanted the concept of "micro-community" into the space, fully respecting children's sense of ownership in the design of reading scenes, with bookshelves that match children's height and browsing habits, flexible block-pieced reading carrels, and fun standing shuttle hole design, creating a comfortable scale space for children while giving them the ability to think and the scale also ensures that parents and children have the ability to think and do. This scale also ensures that parents and children can effectively communicate with each other in different scenes, forming a sufficient sense of psychological security.

In addition to ensuring a pleasant and comfortable reading experience, "we want to create different communication scenarios and more interactive cultural connections." The clever use of technology is one way to achieve the vision, says Darwin Lu. Based on intelligent means, Longhuacheng has completed the data connection with the existing operation system of the book city by adopting the "cloud + end" technical architecture, which can provide readers with personalized and customized book recommendation services and rich value-added services. In the core cultural platform and multimedia display space of the city living room on the second floor, the bookstore and readers can exchange and dialogue with each other through cultural, lecture and forum activities. "What the bookstore sells should not be the books themselves, but the life and cultural forms presented in the books. We hope to create different communication scenarios and more interactive cultural connections to unleash possibilities, as well as provide a framework for the future sustainable development of the bookstore to achieve a new direction of symbiosis between reading and cultural space operations of multiple business forms."

Design Community

"The way of the great road is also the world is public." "On the road of human pursuit of happiness, no country or nation can be left behind." Building a community of human destiny has become a distinctive mark of China's profound association and interaction with the world. Nowadays, more and more Shenzhen designers are looking at the broader international community, adhering to the thinking of "design to solve problems", developing diversified and innovative products for different countries' different needs, meeting people's aspirations for a better life, and becoming a civilizational force active on the international stage.

"Design should not be a purely commercial tool." In the opinion of Zou Tao, the founder of Zhixing Design, "to conscience" is the bottom of his design work. Around 2020, he was invited to participate in the "Light Up Africa Project" organized by the United Nations and the World Bank to develop a series of innovative household appliances based on the design concept of goodness and civilization. "For poor families in Africa, the aesthetics of a product is not important. The key to design is low cost, practicality and environmental protection." Zou Tao explained that the solar lamp, as an example, can be used firstly for home lighting and secondly as a desk lamp for children to study at night. The solar lamp is a double-sided square design, one side of the reading lamp, one side of the solar panel, as long as there is light can be charged for it. The lamp base is designed as a rotatable metal triangle bracket, so that it can not only stand directly on the desktop, hanging on the wall, but also the bracket can be buckled in the mouth of the plastic bottle to become a desk lamp. "Waste plastic bottles are readily available in Africa, and replacing the lamp base with a triangular stand can greatly reduce the cost, so even poor families can afford it. Considering the problem of environmental pollution in Africa, the light box shell is made of wood chips, grain hulls and other biodegradable and environmentally friendly materials." Zou Tao said. Not only that, he also matched the design of mobile energy storage power supply to help local families solve the problem of difficult and expensive electricity consumption.

Pan Hu, a designer who is also concerned about Africa, hopes to bring the most basic "decency" to the local poor people through his design. 2020, Shenzhen Chengxinuo Technology Co. It can not only provide people with night lighting, but also convey some life knowledge and disease prevention and treatment methods. In the product packaging design, Panhu chose to give the packaging a function other than protecting the product, integrating the solar panel, screen, energy-saving lamp and other accessories in a tightly packed corrugated carton box the size of a drawer. After people remove the lamps and equipment inside, the original box is transformed into a drawer for long-term storage. The dividers used to separate the product components in the box can be transformed into different sized hangers by simply tearing and folding. The outer box can also be turned into a closet or six-drawer closet for hanging clothes through simple processing. "A decent life does not necessarily require a high income or social status. Through our design, we can add some daily necessities for the people of the lower class, so that they can spend every penny to get the maximum value, which is 'decent'." Pan Hu said.

In addition, the high-strength, waterproof corrugated packaging is highly durable and the corrugated paper is recycled after use, further reducing the economic pressure on local users. To date, SOLAR MEDIA has brought light to 4.92 million households in 65 countries around the world, improved the lives of 34.8 million people in extreme poverty, and cumulatively reduced 3.82 million tons of CO2 emissions for the planet.

Pan Hu's focus on international charity does not stop there. 2021, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of UNAIDS, he was invited to create the logo and poster visual for its global AIDS campaign. "Stigma, discrimination and pervasive inequality are major obstacles to ending AIDS. As a designer, I hope to awaken more people's attention to AIDS as a group and break down the wall of malice and indifference, prejudice and lack of understanding through my designs." Pan Hu explained. He took the iconic international AIDS symbol "red ribbon" as the inspiration carrier, and extracted the famous line from Xunzi - Cultivate Yourself - "The road is long and difficult, but the journey will be long" as the theme of the poster, symbolizing the theme of the poster is a metaphor for the long and difficult road of HIV prevention, as well as UNAIDS' long and persistent efforts and courageous determination. On this basis, the "LONG" extracted from the English "ROAD AHEAD IS LONG AND HARD" and the traditional Chinese character "长" are displayed in two different forms: horizontal and vertical. The two different forms of vertical posting are presented to adapt to the Chinese and English communication scenarios and effectively break the communication barriers.

"The intersection of Eastern and Western languages and cultures creates a balance of commonality and individuality in this design, fusing into a long trajectory of life. This trajectory is a symbol of life continuity and hope, it is not only a link to connect people to communicate and eliminate the language barrier prejudice, but also a vein to witness the journey forward, which can connect various forces in the long road of fighting AIDS, in order to trigger a good dialogue between society and the AIDS community." In Pan Hu's view, the essence of being born as a human being is the desire and pursuit of love, which has nothing to do with "AIDS". The design can help more people perceive the power of public welfare, re-examine life, re-confront "fear", and re-think the discrimination and gap between people caused by the lack of understanding.

Article Source:艺术与设计

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